BLOOD VOYAGE (1976)
Article 2944 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-30-2009
Posting Date: 9-5-2009
Directed by Frank Mitchell
Featuring Warren Farlow, John Hart, Douglas Hume
Country: USA

Passengers on a yacht bound for Hawaii are being killed off one by one by an unknown assailant. Who can it be?

This is one of those movies I’ve decided to call “listclearers”, because, from my own self-referential point of view, they exist primarily so I can then remove them from my hunt list. Another way to put it is this way; in its own low-budget bottom-half-of-the-drive-in-double-bill way, it manages to adequately achieve competence. It manages to fill its 78 minute running time without ever becoming stultifying or engaging; it remains distracting (though not unpleasantly so) throughout. This is, or course, damning with faint praise, but, beyond the novelty value that it takes place on a yacht, this is by-the-numbers stuff. It’s one of those movies where you watch a scene and immediately know why it exists (“This scene is to make us suspect the cook is the murderer.” “This is one of the murder scenes.” “This scene is designed to get some nudity into the picture.”). It’s watchable, but only in the sense that it’s more interesting than watching paint dry. I bet one week from now I’ll have forgotten this movie ever existed.