Unclean & Unseen! – DEAD CALM (1989)

Suspenseful and intense, DEAD CALM is Australia’s buried treasure just waiting to be found.

It’s an age-old story: entertaining and well-constructed films that flounder at the box office. Even horror’s great directors couldn’t escape this phenomenon in the 80s. Carpenter’s THE THING was indeed too much of a good thing for audiences. Cronenberg’s prescient VIDEODROME might still be ahead of its time. The walls of Tobe Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE fell in on itself in the face of stiff competition, and even Argento’s razor-sharp classic, TENEBRAE, couldn’t get asses in the seats. They were flops one and all in their day before finding their audience in later years.

Though it was a highwater mark for 1980s Australian filmmaking, DEAD CALM is still awaiting its renaissance. 

Later making bank with the Tom Clancy adaptations PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, director Phillip Noyce opts to open his story with a stark, near-wordless exposition. We’re witness to a shattering car accident that takes the life of John and Rae Ingram’s young son. Afterward, they set sail on the open sea, taking refuge in the vast isolation of the Great Barrier Reef in an effort to finally heal from the tragedy. 

Everything seems placid, even hopeful, until a desperate man named Hughie shows up in a rowboat begging for help. His friends have died of food poisoning on a nearby pleasure craft and, in the wake of their recent trauma, the Ingrams are at first reluctant to believe or investigate his story. Eventually John checks out the dilapidated craft, only to find all of Hughie’s friends have been hideously murdered, not poisoned. This jumpstarts a nail-biting and artfully-balanced game of cat-and-mouse that finds Rae using all her cunning to survive the loony and devilishly persuasive Hughie while her husband fights to stay alive on the madman’s ship, a floating blood-stained murder scene bloated with corpses and slowly beginning to take on water. 

Few films of its era are able to sustain suspense better than DEAD CALM, and there are numerous people to credit for its success. Noyce and editor Richard Francis-Bruce keep both settings hopping as Graeme Revell’s score huffs and puffs in the background. Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman (in one of her first major roles) breathe humanity and tenacity alike into their roles as the Ingrams, while a pre-TITANIC Billy Zane chews the scenery admirably as Hughie. The smart, kinetic screenplay was written by Terry Hayes and adapted from the novel of the same name by Charles Williams, who took inspiration from the Bluebelle, a Florida-based ketch that was the site of multiple murder in the early 1960s. 

Another of the film’s most interesting footnotes is that it was slated to be made 25 years earlier by none other than Orson Welles. The project, initially entitled THE DEEP and similarly adapted from Williams’ novel, unfortunately fell during the CITIZEN KANE auteur’s lean 60s era, which found him continually plagued by hubris and bad business decisions as he became an aging, fading star.

Though Noyce’s project fared better than Welles’, its box office receipts were underwhelming on both sides of the Pacific–it barely made back its AU$10 million budget at home while only eking out a US tally just shy of $8 million. Though critics have been historically fond of the film, and in recent years The New York Times even tagged it on their best 1,000 films list, DEAD CALM still floats out there on the horizon as a treasure waiting to be found by international terror film fans.

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