Cruise Ship Murder (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on I watched a much better Lifetime film, Cruise Ship Murder, even though I’d expected from the promos that it would be about a series of murders taking place on board a cruise liner instead of just one murder taking place aboard a cruise ship and most of the action is on land. The story begins with yet another enigmatic prologue typical of Lifetime these days – a middle-aged woman is deliberately strangled and drowned in a bathtub – before it cuts to the main action: husband and wife Ian (Matthew Pohlkamp) and Theresa (Carly Reeves) McNeil set sail on an ocean cruise from their home in Beverly Hills down the west coast of Mexico. Once she’s on board, Theresa is accosted by a former boyfriend, Colin Barth (Ryan Carnes), with whom she had an affair while already married to Ian. Colin deliberately booked passage on the same Voyager Cruises liner as Ian and Theresa and made it clear that he wanted to resume their affair. Theresa goes for a walk on deck – or at least that’s what she tells her husband; she’s actually going to Colin’s cabin – only to be panicked when the ship’s whistle sounds a warning alerting everyone to return to their cabins because the ship is hitting heavy seas and the cabins are the safest place to ride out the danger. A young woman named Sara Bates (Jamie Forst) runs into Theresa – literally – coming out of Colin’s cabin after she’s dashing to get back to her own because her parents might look askance at her for having been out necking with a young blond cutie who’s regrettably unidentified in imdb.com’s cast list.

Then Theresa’s black sequined purse is found on deck and Ian immediately assumes that she somehow fell overboard during the storm the characters were being warned to flee from. He demands that the ship stop so they can look for her, and when the storm subsides the U.S. Coast Guard sends out cutters to look for Theresa’s body. Once the cruise is over the story’s focus shifts to Theresa’s niece, free-lance journalist Olivia Toller (Skye Coyne), who decides to investigate Theresa’s death and soon becomes convinced that Ian murdered her, or had her killed, for her money (she had inherited a major fortune from her father, though that didn’t stop her from working at an advertising agency). With the help of her African-American “roommate” Callie (Tyler Price) – who seems to be so close to her emotionally I mentally remixed the film to make them a Lesbian couple – Olivia traces Ian’s mysterious past and finds that he legally had his name changed from Jamison to McNeil, and as Ian Jamison he already lost a previous wife when she ostensibly committed suicide by drowning herself in the bathtub – though a flashback sequence lets us know that she was murdered and that’s the origin of the mysterious scene we saw at the beginning. Olivia traces Donald Warren (Jeff Doba), father of Ian’s first wife, who’s still bitter that Ian knocked off Donald’s daughter and got away with it.

Later Olivia discovers that Colin Barth was the real killer of both Ian’s wives; he and Ian were long-term friends and Colin had once been the house guest of Ian and his first wife until she got tired of him and demanded that Ian throw Colin out. Colin killed the wife so Ian could collect on the huge insurance policy he’d taken out on her, then Colin tried to blackmail Ian. Colin’s financial demands were so great that Ian ran out of money and had to look for a similarly wealthy woman he could marry and then knock off, which is what he was doing with Theresa on that cruise. As with Ian’s first wife, the two planned the crime together but Colin was the one who actually carried it out. Then midway through the movie Colin knocked off Ian because, even though Ian hadn’t inherited Theresa’s millions yet and Colin would have no claim to the money, Ian was threatening to turn them both in and Colin couldn’t let him live to do that. Even the ending is a bit unusual for Lifetime: noting from Colin’s social-media page that he’s always at a certain bar at a certain day of the week and time, Olivia goes there intending to cruise Colin and get him to take her to his place. Once there she searches his bedroom for clues – and discovers a brochure for the same cruise Ian and Theresa took – only Colin knows very well who she is and why she’s there.

Colin hunts down Olivia at her own home, killing the cop who was supposed to be standing guard. Colin pulls a knife on her, they struggle for it, and in the end Olivia grabs the knife and stabs Colin to death in self-defense. Fortunately her “roommate” Callie is there to witness the whole thing and tell the rather discombobulated Asian-American woman police detective who’s been investigating the case (and who appears midway through, apparently having taken the case over from the Black male detective who was investigating it earlier) that it was justifiable homicide, and at the end Olivia and Callie take an ocean cruise of their own. Though I was disappointed that Cruise Ship Murder wasn’t set entirely, or almost entirely, on the cruise ship (I was expecting something more along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rich and Strange and The Lady Vanishes, which effectively used the confined spaces of a ship and a train, respectively, to stage a compelling mystery story), it’s nonetheless a powerful, effective melodrama, well directed by Randy Carter from a beautifully constructed script by Hybrid Productions’ regulars: Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff.