A cult known as “The Brotherhood of Darkness” is murdered by a masked assassin who dumps the leader’s body in the middle of a lake. Two years later, the leader’s spirit possesses a motorboat that putts around the lake chopping up tourists with its outboard motor. It’s then up to the sheriff and a priest with a sketchy past to confront and kill the diabolical dinghy.
Motorboat doesn’t even get out of the dock before there are problems. The early scenes are edited in a nearly incomprehensible manner with lots of lens filters fogging up the action and making things difficult to see. Seriously, a movie about a sentient homicidal motorboat should not start off this convoluted. Also, everyone (including the hero) wears masks, so it’s obvious that much of the dialogue was looped in after the fact (and was probably all done by the same person). To make matters worse, scenes are repeated again and again in the form of flashbacks and dreams. In fact, without these repeated sequences (and the unnecessary news reports that break up the action every fifteen minutes or so), the flick would’ve easily been about forty-five minutes long.
Motorboat (I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt here. Let me get something off my chest: Motorboat is a really lame title. A movie about a killer motorboat is called… Motorboat? I mean, COME ON! MURDERboat was right there!) is essentially Jaws, but with a possessed motorboat. I just wish director Mark Polonia leaned more into the concept. Unfortunately, he lets the flick get bogged down with all the unnecessary backstory involving the cult. While some of the CGI shots of the boat’s ghostly aura aren’t bad, the close-ups make it look downright pathetic. (It’s just a toy boat painted black.) I’ll admit, the idea of a killer boat is just dumb enough to work, but the boat attack scenes are so weak that it causes the film to sink.
The bright side: As bad as Motorboat is, it’s far from the worst Polonia movie I’ve seen.
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