It's not often that either a Disney movie or an offbeat fantasy movie entirely escapes my attention, which makes the film that I watched last night on the British retro TV channel Talking Pictures rather special, because it is both a Disney/Touchstone movie AND an offbear fantasy movie yet was previously wholly unknown to me.
Directed and written by Adam Resnick, co-produced by Tim Burton, and released in 1994 by Buena Vista Pictures, the movie in question was entitled Cabin Boy.
Its titular character begins the movie as a petulant, thoroughly-obnoxious spoiled brat named Nathanial Mayweather (played by Chris Elliott), son of a zillionaire and newly graduated from colleage, who is meant to board a luxurious ship to take him to his father's plush hotel in Hawaii. Instead, his insulting treatment of a village local (a pseudonymously-credited David Letterman) sees him deliberately guided onto the wrong vessel.
Namely, a sleazy fishing boat whose rough-and-ready crew, skippered by the grizzly-mannered (and looking!) Captain Greybar (Ritch Brinkley), are setting far out to sea for three months in order to catch fish and have no time for a horrified Nathanial's hysterical histrionics once he discovers this awful truth.
Thanks to his desperate but disastrous attempt to redirect their boat towards Hawaii, however, they all find themselves heading instead to a mysterious ill-omened sea zone named Hell's Bucket, containing an equally-dreaded island.
In revenge, Greybar and his crew make Nathanial serve them as their cabin boy, albeit with predictably preposterous results. Both en route to the island and upon arrival there, Nathanial and the crew find themselves confronting all manner of outlandish outsiders.
They include everything from a sex-starved six-armed woman named Calli (a sly nod to Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad antagonist Kali), a scowling scolding ginormous aerial cupcake (designed by Tim Burton and voiced by Jim Cummings), the fishing boat's female figurehead (Rikki Lake) who comes alive at the most unexpected moments, a belligerent iceberg monster (as in a belligerent monster actually composed of an iceberg!), and a half-man half-shark deepsea denizen named Chocki who takes pity upon hapless, hopeless Nathanial, rescuing him from assorted maritime perils, and played, incongruously, by none other than Hollywood's erstwhile song-and-dance musicals star Russ Tamblyn!
Nor is that all. Nathanial mistakenly 'rescues' from the waves what turns out to be a round-the-world swimming competitor in the shapely shape of Trina (Melora Walters), thereby disqualifying her. Unsurprisingly, Trina is initially resentful of Nathanial's well-meaning yet nonetheless calamitous action, but as the movie's romantic interest for him, she eventually falls for his goofy, bumbling charm.
Needless to say, by the end of the movie Nathanial's experiences have transformed him into a sharing, caring kinda guy, and everyone lives happily ever after – except for a vengeful giant named Mulligan (Mike Starr), that is. Mulligan is the aggrieved husband of Calli, with whom Nathanial had lately travered his rite of passage into manhood. Not surprisingly, Mulligan is hardly best pleased about this, but he finds himself belted in every sense of the word by the newly-invigorated Nathanial in a bold, unselfishly brave bid to save his fellow shipmates from Mulligan's ire.
Cabin Boy is every shade of zany imaginable (and then some!), with Elliott giving a riotously funny performance as Nathanial, amply augmented by countless sight gags and amusing asides – I loved it!
To experience a salty snippet of the maritime mayhem awaiting you in Cabin Boy, be sure to click here to watch an official trailer for this movie on YouTube.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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