Captain Calamity is an early pirate film about Captain Bill Jones, a sailor who accepts a gold coin for transporting a man. When he pays off with the gold coin, speculation spreads that he has a treasure. Soon after, a band of pirates are after him and the gold. The plot was really strange and convoluted, so the details were lost to me. This is partly because because the technical mistakes were so distracting that it was hard to care about anything. When watching the film, I quickly realized that it was a complete mess. I was foolish and had vowed to watch through the whole thing, resulting in one of my worst movie experiences.
The acting is downright horrible. Captain Bill Jones could have been quite a charismatic character, but he ends up being a complete clown. The other acting was just as terrible, and the characters themselves were bland and forgettable. I could not bring myself to care about any single character. The dialog was also terrible.
The camera-work is some of the sloppiest I have ever seen. There is no sense of orientation because nearly all the scenes focus directly on the characters or their faces, so the surrounding environment is a complete mystery. This leads to immense continuity confusion. It does not help that the editing is also bad; the scene changes seem very jerky and unnatural.
Captain Calamity fails on every level that I judge movies on. I had no fun at all; I was hoping that the (potentially) exciting seafaring theme might overshadow the problems, but it was nowhere near the case. I do not even want to think about watching the movie again, ever. It looks like Captain Calamity is largely forgotten or ignored by today's viewers, which I think is a worthy fate.
