My interest in Overboard was re-kindled during a Kurt-Russel-Movie-Knowing Contest that I was having against a co-worker in my company’s North Carolina office. I lost the contest at the point when the guy said “I should get back to work.” That is also a moment when I felt very embarrassed about who I am in society.

Speaking of society, I believe today’s would not tolerate a RomCom whose premise is really the common-law felony of false imprisonment paired with a hearty helping of Stockholm Syndrome. But I could be wrong. We are a society that tolerated the movie Old Dogs.

I wonder if I am the only person ever to rent Overboard from Netflix. If I am not, I believe the other people are grad students studying the mise-en-scène of people falling off ships in contemporary cinema. The course also includes compulsory viewings of The Poseidon Adventure and Speed 2: Cruise Control.

Overboard is a movie about love, and how sometimes the best kind of love is born out of the creepiest kind of deceptions. Like, say, if you are a debutant and you fall overboard on your yacht and a guy that used to work for you exploits your neurological condition by enslaving you under the false pretense that you are his wife and the mother of his numerous children. What the hell, 1986?

I was alive then, but maybe I missed a moment in time when jupiter eclipsed the sun and
Hollywood invited a villainous feudal lord from the middle ages to write and submit a script for a comedic romp. If Overboard were released today it would be one of those weird mid-winter horror movies with Peter Sarsgaard or Ryan Reynolds in it but, might include original
dialogue from the movie like this (spoken by Goldie Hawn’s character Joanna Stayton):

“I don’t belong here, I feel it, don’t you think I feel it.
I can’t do any of these vile things and I wouldn’t WANT to.
Oh, my life is like death.
My children are the spawn of hell, and you’re the devil. Oh God.”

One day, when our earth has been destroyed and the aliens are combing through the detritus of our civilization they will come across the original movie poster for Overboard and one alien will read the poster aloud and say “My goodness, this looks like a fucked up sea of trouble.”

I give it one shark mauled remains of a surf board, which roughly translates to a C-.