Contains spoilers...(duh, this film is 37 years old).
Horror movie husbands are frequently terrible. They move their families into creepy houses, they refuse to listen, they become possessed and relentlessly chop wood. Their long-suffering wives frequently have to plead with them; to move from the creepy house; to believe that something is terribly wrong; not to go back for the teddy bear; not to sit in a darkened room smoking and drinking and watching Super-8 home-movies.
Sam Neill, here playing Captain John Ingram, was a terrible horror movie husband in 1981’s deranged Possession. A husband and father so terrible he punched his wife in the face and went on a 3 week long bender, leaving his kid alone at home to survive by eating jam. The kid later drowns in the bath because both his parents are terrible, terrible self-absorbed, neglectful arse-holes.
In Dead Calm he’s a dream of a horror movie husband, but then the bar is low. I mean, he does leave his wife, Rae, (Nicole Kidman) on her own on a boat with a sweaty nut-case. Let’s also try and ignore the icky age difference between them. Neill was thirty-nine and Nicole Kidman was not yet old enough to buy an alcoholic drink in the States, though apparently her character is supposed to be 24. That’s movie casting for you, I guess. Girls only just old enough to drive are wives to men that were around to remember when seat belts weren’t mandatory and thirty-five year old women are playing the mothers of thirty-three year old men.
Following the traumatic death of their young son, John and Rae take a Pacific ocean vacation on their yacht The Saracen with their dog Ben. Not too long into their trip, they spy a boat that appears to be in trouble. John radios the boat but there’s no response. However one passenger is already on his way to The Saracen. That’s Hughie (Billy Zane) a man with a handful of passports, a newspaper ad clipping that says ‘hot girls wanted’ and a terrible story to tell.
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| Hughie...stranger danger in human form |
The Orpheus, the ship he has abandoned, is sinking, taking the other already dead passengers down with it. How did they die, Hughie? Food poisoning you say? Ten days earlier? Hmmm. This would make me query 1) what Hughie had been eating for those ten days and 2) Exactly how long does it take a ship to sink?
John and Rae also look a bit doubtful of Hughie’s story (John flips the horror movie husband switch by being the one that’s more sus of Hughie, instead of Rae begging him to believe her that something is wrong) but they can’t exactly tell him to bugger off, so they lock him in the bedroom while John goes to investigate The Orpheus. Once onboard, John finds the dismembered remains of the crew and passengers, realises his spidey senses about Hughie were right, and desperately tries to get back to The Saracen.
However, Hughie has busted his way out of the bedroom, knocked Rae out and stolen the boat, leaving poor John floating in the middle of the ocean. Which is obviously not good, but in a way, it is because we get a feast for the eyes in the form of Sam Neill wearing soaking wet see through clothes. Mr. Darcy who.
Rae wakes on The Saracen with a split lip and a cracking headache and Hughie is doing a funny little dance on the deck and pretending he doesn’t know who John is or where he’s gone. Then Hughie says, ‘I was watching you while you were sleeping, I’ve got to say your face fascinates me,’ and tells Rae she has ‘magnificent bone structure’. Rae tries to convince Hughie to turn the boat around, but he says ‘they tried to suck the life out me!’ Facing a clearly unwell man, Rae plays along. It is a testament to Billy Zane’s acting that he is so handsome with his Marlon Brando face, beautiful white teeth and huge brown eyes but still manages to be utterly repulsive.
Back to The Orpheus and John, now topless and very sweaty, has got the electrics working again and finds a video of the crew and passengers. Creepily, his own ship is the background of a video where a man has an argument with Hughie, who then basically goes nuts and kills everybody, though we don’t know why he also had to cut their heads off.
On The Saracen, while Hughie is distracted playing with the dog, Rae tries to radio The Orpheus. I absolutely love the way she says, ‘John are you there?’ in her squeaky little voice.
As it becomes clear that Hughie isn’t going to be talked into going back, or letting Rae go, she feigns affection and attraction for him ( and she does this very well, considering when they kiss it makes me gip because I am thinking how unpleasant it is for her).
She makes Hughie a post-coital lemonade laced with sedatives and we are treated to a very funny POV as the drugs take hold and Hughie can’t see straight. It’s around this mark that poor Ben gets harpooned so skip ahead around 4 minutes if you want to miss that bit.
With Hughie incapacitated below deck, Rae tries to turn the boat around, but the winds are high as a storm passes so she struggles. And she needs to hurry...John is adrift on a make-shift raft and has set fire to the sinking schooner. With both Rae and John having some sense of self-preservation, it’s a nice change to have horror movie characters that aren’t total dumbasses that deserve to die.
Just
kidding, of course it isn’t, suckers. They couple
find the now-empty life-raft
and assume Hughie’s dead, because where the fuck is he? Who cares.
Rae takes a calming dip and John tenderly washes her hair (aside from
the fact he’s now no longer with us, a few thousand miles and a 30
year age gap, I am gutted that Sam Neill will never
tenderly wash
my hair). But gah! No, it’s Hughie. Why did John go and leave Rae
with her hair covered in shampoo? Who knows. But he flare guns Hughie
pow right in the kisser. Roollllll credits.
Writing this, I learned that test audiences didn’t like the original ending – a red rope training in the water, a bloody handprint on the side of the boat – considering it too ‘open ended’. Thus the flare-to-the-face final five minutes was tacked on to the end. I think this spoils things a bit. I like the idea of not knowing Hughie’s fate, and I like that Rae’s the one that saves the day.
I can’t remember the first time I watched Dead Calm. It probably would have occupied that space between Christian Slater movies and ones like Flatliners. Billy Zane likely would have been the main draw, with Sam Neill being too dad coded to be fanciable when I was a teenager (though Jurassic Park did have me and and sister obsessed with his butt for a time). Talking of dads, it’s Kidman that’s the true Daddy of this film. Rae is resourceful, smart and capable. We don’t need another pointless 5 minutes for John to rescue her right back when she’s already done a perfectly decent job thank you very much.
But this review was really an excuse to write about Sam Neill, who passed away on 13 July.
His career spanned 51 years and over 70 films. Though for horror fans he’s very much a confirmed Scream King, his range of performance and projects feels unmatched. He had the ability to play even the vilest of characters with elements of humanity; not just a villain but human, containing multitudes.
His wholesome Instagram account documented his life with his farm animals and birds, and his career as a winegrower. He was an advocate for local environmental issues and animal welfare.
In 2022, he was diagnosed with stage 3 angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, and at the time of his death the cancer was in remission.
An 2025 August
interview with the Telegraph, published after his death, concludes:
As our time together came to a close, Neill was wry about the subject of death. “You know, I have a little painting by Helena Bonham Carter’s mother, Elena Propper De Callejón,” he explained. “It is a very sweet watercolour of a funny old thing in a flowery dress and bonnet. At the bottom of the painting is an inscription: ‘But she was kind…’ When I am no longer about, I hope someone will be able to say that about me.”
I didn’t know you, Sam. But I’d put money on it that as well as being talented and funny and handsome, you were also very, very kind.
Sam Neill, photographed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, January 2016 Credit: Jeff Vespa/WireImage
