RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•John works in Tokyo for Eiji Saito's company, but he also has a relationship with Miho, his boss's wife. Additionally, John frequently has nightmares in which he relives the tragedy that happened to his brother when they were children, an episode in which he saw his little brother drown without being able to help him. One day, Mr. Saito invites John to spend a day with him and his wife on their yacht, out at sea; John accepts, but he suspects that his boss has discovered his wife's infidelity.
"Masters of Horror" is a singular project born from the mind of Mick Garris, a director known in the horror field mainly for the adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris thought of bringing together the most representative horror film directors in a project destined for cable TV Showtime and home video, the result is "Masters of Horror", a series of 13 short films of 60 minutes each, each directed by a great name in genre cinema; each episode has a budget of 1.8 million dollars, the location set in the Canadian city of Vancouver and total creative freedom was granted to each director. The names involved in the second season of this project are: Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brand Anderson, Tom Holland, Peter Medak, Rob Schmidt, Norio Tsuruta and Mick Garris himself.
Just as it happened in the first season of "Masters of Horror", in this second season a director from the Far East is also called upon, but Norio Tsuruta is not Takashi Miike and "Crociera di sangue" falls into all the defects that "Imprint - Sulle tracce del terrore" managed to overlook.
Tsuruta, already the author of not exactly exhilarating j-horror films like "Ring 0 - Birthday", decides not to strain his imagination too much and takes full advantage of the most obvious ghost story situation from the East, with otherworldly grudges that animate a ghost with a pale face, white dress and long raven hair on the face, all seasoned with a massive dose of water used, as is customary, as a disturbing element.
Just as often happens with American productions with an Eastern director, in "Crociera di sangue" an American protagonist is inserted into an Eastern context; here the protagonist is the bland and unexpressive Daniel Gillies ("Spiderman 2"; "Captivity"), accompanied by the attractive Yoshino Kimura and the always professional Ryo Ishibashi ("The Grudge"; "Rogue - Il solitario"), now an icon of Japanese horror. The character played by Gillies, moreover, is not very well developed, appearing simply built on a series of stereotypes: a good-looking young man and "reluctant" seducer who bases his existence on a sense of guilt, which extends from the relationship with his boss's wife to the death of his little brother whom he has always felt responsible for, an element, this one, seen in dozens of films and here frankly avoidable.
This thirteenth episode of the second season of "Masters of Horror" nevertheless has a first part quite engaging, based on the sense of danger given by Eiji's jealousy and the impossibility of being able to escape in the open sea. The first half hour, with thriller construction and some bursts of unexpected violence, holds up rather well, despite the naivety that has been discussed; unfortunately the episode has
an inescapable descent into predictability and mediocrity with the entrance of the paranormal elements. If, as often happens in Eastern ghost stories, the resentful ghost becomes the protagonist of at least one high-tension scene, its presence is constantly an index of déjà-vu, amplified this time by a sense of déjà-vu wanted, as if to celebrate within this TV series the typical elements of modern Eastern horror cinema.
Unfortunate and sometimes ridiculous choice to have wanted to render the ghost as an entity cloaked in a phosphorescent shimmer, a characteristic that makes it decidedly less threatening.
In short, "Crociera di sangue" is positioned among the weakest episodes of this second season, mainly due to an excessive sense of déjà-vu; it is still worth watching, resulting paradoxically more entertaining than many j-horror films that "Crociera di sangue" openly draws inspiration from.