In late 1945, somewhere in the North Atlantic, a small band of survivors float directionless in a lifeboat following the torpedoing of the hospital ship they were on. With food and water gone, the desperate batch of mismatched folks are willing to risk passage on a large Nazi minesweeper as opposed to starving to death. They make their way aboard and find it seemingly abandoned, which is fortuitous because the whole lot of them are people that the Nazi’s would rather see dead than taken prisoner. Their luck ends there though, because this ship is full of vampires and these vampires are hungry as hell. Some of the survivors are helpful, some are assholes (lookin’ at you, New York), some may have a secret or two and one of them looks like Phil Collins in disguise as Ringo Starr. All of ‘em have scars both mental and physical. Before everything goes to hell, there’s troubling corpses to look over, the realization that any means of escape were destroyed for some reason, egos to clash, a boiler that needs to be shut down before it explodes and a pale Romanian child who is sticking to the shadows. A horrifying tome is found in the captain’s chambers along with his crispy corpse and the little girl seems excited to introduce the gang to her family. Fuck that. Nazi gold, an ominous box of holy relics, the well-documented Nazi obsession with occultism and a strange infection keep everyone on their toes before inevitably going off to meet their maker. A solid cast helps move things along and brief glimpses of the reasoning as to why the nightmare creature aboard works a lot better than it would if the film just shrugged and said “vampires on a Nazi boat.” It all helps make the time before we meet our monster just a bit more interesting. He’s also got a bat head on a bipedal body and I’m all for that. It’s fun but it also feels like it could have been a little more substantial than it is… still recommend a watch.
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