All Aboard a Star-Studded ’70s Death Cruise

Depending on how you look at Death Cruise, a 1974 made-for-TV movie produced by Aaron Spelling, it’s either about the horrors of matrimony or the nightmare of traveling with one’s spouse. Either way, it’s one of the more unexpectedly delightful entries in Kate Jackson’s oeuvre, with wardrobe changes galore and the revelation of an unexpected, and somewhat butch, talent—she plays a crack skeet-shooter.

A year removed from her devilishly amusing performance in Satan’s School for Girls, Jackson stars as Mary Frances Radney, the luminous bride of Jimmy (Edward Albert), a boyish attorney. They’re on a second honeymoon, having won an all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise vacation. They’re assigned to dinner table 24 with two other couples, also winners: staid suburbanites David and Elizabeth Mason (Tom Bosley and Celeste Holm) and the quarrelsome Carters, Jerry and Sylvia (Richard Long and Polly Bergen).

The Radneys engage in saccharine stateroom exchanges, with Jimmy asking “You know why I married you? Because every time I look at you, it’s love at first sight again.” (Jackson and Albert, real-life exes, also played a couple in Killer Bees earlier that year; he’s little more than arm candy in each film.) But rifts are soon exposed between all three couples. Jerry’s a serial adulterer who radiates sleaze and takes scant precautions to spare his wife’s feelings. When it’s suggested that Sylvia look for him on the sports deck, she bitterly replies, “Oh, that’s not exactly Jerry’s game. He goes more for… indoor sports.”

David views the cruise as an excuse to wear garish vacation clothes while reconnecting with Elizabeth, whose focus on their adult children and new grandchild has left him feeling like the odd man out. Their subplot, which at first seems quaint and comic, takes a dark turn when a day-drinking Elizabeth lets loose with a harsh assessment of their marriage. The commanding Holm, of All About Eve and Gentleman’s Agreement, lends their spat more elegance than what was typically found in an Aaron Spelling production.

“The magic is gone. All 30 years’ worth. This may not be easy for you to swallow, but you were never the magic. The children were. And I thank you for them. All I ever was to you was chief cook and hostess, with sleep-in privileges. The children were my whole life. Because without them, I wouldn’t have had any life at all. ‘Cause you were always out to lunch. Now all of the sudden it’s just you and me, babe? Just the two of us? I’m sorry, David. That would really have to be magic.”

celeste holm in death cruise (1974)

“The words ‘happily’ and ‘married’ contradict each other and should never be used in the same sentence,” David tells Jimmy at the bar afterward. The inevitable bust-up between the Radneys also involves children. They agreed not to have any, but Mary Frances is having second thoughts and likens their carefree existence to “trying to be sweet sixteen forever.” Jimmy heatedly replies “If you just have to have the patter of little feet you’re gonna have to buy yourself a cocker spaniel.”

As if all the domestic discord wasn’t enough, someone starts killing off the table 24 diners, until five are dead. There’s a drowning, a skull fracture, a shooting or two, and with each new slaughter the unseen killer marks the victim’s face with an ‘x’ on a handily printed group photo. Every bit as baffling as the killer’s penchant for gratuitous self-incrimination are the mechanics of the investigation, informally undertaken by Dr. Burke, the ship’s physician.

Burke is played by Michael Constantine (who helped Robert Reed with his obscene phone-call compulsion in The Secret Night Caller) as a man of great integrity and intellect. It nevertheless strains credulity that a doctor on a cruise ship, with all the food and alcohol and sun poisoning that entails, never tends to (living) patients. Burke’s abundance of free time isn’t the only element of Jack B. Sowards’ screenplay (Ralph Senensky directed) that is cheerfully nonsensical—the convoluted conspiracy behind the killings is equally laughable.

That viewers will quickly piece together the killer’s identity and motivation does nothing to detract from the film’s likability. Bosley and Holm would’ve made this enough of a curiosity for me to check out; Jackson’s skeet-shooting was the icing on the cake. You’re going to have to trust me when I say that despite its obviousness, Death Cruise is a weirdly murder-y and Love Boat-ish spiritual precursor to John McNaughton’s 1998 trash classic, Wild Things, minus the teens and bisexuality. It’s an unwieldy combination, sure, but this is a choppy ride that won’t leave you seasick.

Additional screen caps can be found here, on Instagram.

Streaming and DVD availability

Death Cruise hasn’t been released on DVD and there are no authorized copies on streaming platforms. Luckily, you can usually find it on YouTube. And here’s your obligatory reminder that Amazon and Tubi allow you to stream several Jackson films for free.

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