Oct 112001
 
two reels

In 1972, the SS Corona Queen vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, taking with it Aaron Roberts’ parents. Now, the ship has returned, a derelict. Roberts (Judd Nelson), now a paranormal investigator, and three TV tabloid reporters catch a ride to the ship with salvage agent David Shaw (Lance Henriksen) and two employees (Jeff Kober, Mark Sheppard). Of course, the ship is haunted.

A run-of-the-mill, ghosts-on-a-boat film, Lost Voyage has a bit more style than other low-budget frighteners. A cast containing some talented character actors helps. Henriksen,  Kober, and Sheppard elevate the material and add both a touch of realism and humor. Unfortunately, they aren’t the leads. Those jobs fall to Janet Gunn, who does an adequate job of playing the same journalist I’ve seen in dozens of films, and Judd Nelson, who needs to up his medications (and wash his hair). Wide eyed, he murmurs his lines with randomly chosen expressions.  His Aaron Roberts is an odd sort of protagonist since the film follows him, but the story does not. He is very concerned about what happened to his parents (well, he says he is; it’s hard to tell from his inflections), but nothing comes of it and his interest just fades away.

While a moody story of a haunting, it proclaims itself to be a variation on 1997’s space-faring Event Horizon. In both, a ship leaves our universe, traveling to an unexplained and probably evil other place (none of which is on camera), and then returns, bringing along an intelligence. This entity, now merged with the ship, uses people’s fears and desires to destroy them. While in Event Horizon this is an essential part of the film and is demonstrated by events, in Lost Voyage it’s just said by the characters. Roberts proclaims that “My research shows that the triangle is a doorway to another place.” I’m curious just what kind of research he’s been doing.

Lost Voyage would have benefited from less mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science. I would be thrilled if I never saw another film that mentioned the Bermuda Triangle or included an institute that studies the paranormal.  So, the whole thing is rather silly. No surprise there. But for what it is, a cheap, supernatural thriller, it’s not bad.

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