MOON IN SCORPIO (1987)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


There's a good reason why "sailboat thrillers" never became an established genre. Despite one or two exceptions to the rule, like 1989's DEAD CALM, most of the time it's impossible to do much of anything in the restricted space of a relatively small sea-craft out in the wastes of the ocean.

To complicate things further, director Gary Graver claimed that this seaborne slasher was originally intended to revolve around a supernatural menace. Allegedly the film's producer converted the writer's original story into a slasher-film, and juggled the editing in a manner that made the story confusing. I have no problem crediting this, but even so, it doesn't seem like either Graver or writer Robert Aiken gave the producer much to work with. This is no disappointment regarding Aiken, a small-time actor who'd only scripted one other film (another of Graver's directorial efforts). But Graver sometimes was able to enhance the poor scripts of other films with dynamic cinematography.

MOON IN SCORPIO is another "in media res" film. The Coast Guard comes across a drifting sailboat on which five of the six known occupants are missing or dead. Only one remains to tell the tale: frenetic Linda (Britt Ekland), and the rest of the film is composed of her flashbacks to the horrific incident, occasionally interrupted by talking-head scenes between Linda and a psychiatrist.

Given Graver's story about the producer's interference, I'm not surprised that the identity of the psycho-killer-- a "mystery monster" who escapes an asylum and somehow gets in good with one of the boat's guests-- never makes much sense. But it's evident that the script also devotes no more than cursory interest in the other five characters, although in theory it ought to be their psychological conflicts that heighten the tension once they're all stuck with each other at sea.

I won't say that the bad script of MOON IN SCORPIO is any sort of missed opportunity, but there is a little potential in the opening set-up. Linda has just married Vietnam veteran Allen (John Philip Law), and she knows he's close with two other surviving veterans, Burt and Mark. Yet she doesn't expect Allen to accept an invitation to spend their honeymoon on a sailboat with the two guys and their respective girlfriends. Some chaotic flashback scenes of the three soldiers in Vietnam-- apparently not part of Linda's own flashback-- establish that they committed some mutual sin in Vietnam, a sin which was originally going to unleash a supernatural menace. Even with the monster excised, this plot could have been used to make clearer that the trio's bond stems out of shared guilt, and that this guilt, as well as Allen's general experiences in war, make it difficult for Allen to re-acclimatize to civilian life. But the three men and the three women are all zeros in the personality department, and so even this minor potential goes to waste.