How much you understand what’s going on in Victor Halperin’s Torture Ship will largely depend on which version of the film you see. Most versions doing the rounds these days are shorn of ten minutes of footage (it only runs just shy on an hour in its uncut form) with a great chunk of the opening missing, leaving unwary viewers struggling to make sense of what they’re watching. The shortened version certainly wastes no time in getting going though you’ll struggle to make head or tail of it all.
Dr Stander (Irving Pichel, much better than the material deserves) is an endocrinologist searching for a way to eradicate criminal tendencies through surgery. Fleeing angry authorities, he sets sail on a ship with his assistants, his nephew Bob (Lyle Talbot, later of Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)), Bob’s girlfriend Joan (Julie Bishop) and a group of criminals that they’ve abducted from the streets (among them Wheeler Oakman, Russell Hopton and Skelton Knaggs).There he continues his work but soon comes to realise that he needs to test his procedures on a non-criminal first to test its efficacy. So Bob goes under the knife with the result that he turns into an aggressive criminal. He doesn’t take kindly to this and leads the other prisoners in a mutiny to seize control of the torture ship.
An early release from Producers’ Pictures, which became Producers’ Releasing Corporation in 1940 and was responsible for any number of cheapo horror and exploitation, Torture Ship is an early example of surgical horror though that’s about all it has going for it. The title raises expectations that the no-one involved in making the film had any real intention of matching. In fact it’s barely really genre at all – the doctor’s experiments are largely kept off screen, barely discussed and play second fiddle to plenty of fisticuffs and far too much soapy relationship drivel.
Apart from a few cheaply done back projections, the action, such as it is, could be taking place just about anywhere. There’s no real sense of this being a film about a group of people trapped on a ship on a “cruise to nowhere.” The sets are as barely dressed, just empty stages with the odd bit of furniture here and there to break up the monotony but never once do you see anything particularly nautical.
An interesting cast does little but stand around yakking and occasionally throwing a few punches and the whole thing is tedious and lifelessly directed by Victor Haleprin. There’s little here of the atmosphere of his earlier classic White Zombie (1932) and producers Sigmund Neufeld and Ben Judell resorted to name-checking author Jack London in the credits, the film supposedly being based on his 1899 short story A Thousand Deaths, his first ever published story. Even a cursory glance at the story suggests that Neufeld and Judell were being, at best, optimistic, at worst incredibly disingenuous. The short story is, at least in part, about a man being killed and returned to life but beyond that vague thread of mad science, Torture Ship bears no resemblance whatsoever to London’s work. Instead the feeble narrative is the work of George Wallace Sayre, the writer of Nick Grinde’s Boris Karloff-starring The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), working in cahoots with the obscure Harvey Huntley who seems not have worked in film again.
The plot is stuffed full of uninteresting romantic entanglements (Bob is being wooed by female murderer Poison Mary (Sheila Bromley)) and the writers are easily distracted, constantly dipping back into this particularly unrewarding well rather than making good on the promise of their title. There’s a surfeit of feeble attempts at comic relief, a notable lack of any torture and an inability to stick to the point and actually tell a coherent story. It is, in short, bloody terrible. It’s obviously impoverished but no amount of money being thrown at it would have overcome the appalling script or compensated for Halperin’s uninspired direction.
Torture Ship isn’t particularly hard to find tracking down an uncut version requires a bit of hard work and patience. The trimmed version pops up in several of those multi-film DVD packs and can be found online without much effort – just don’t expect to make and sense of what’s going on. If you want the full story, you’ll need to put in the extra miles and track down the one hour version. Whether all that hard work and patience required is then rewarded is debatable.
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