Keeping it classy here on Professional Moron, we’re taking a look at the Netflix documentary Poop Cruise. It’s from the Trainwreck series on the platform and this one just launched (June 2025).
This episode is at once disgusting, hilarious, and quite disturbing. It chronicles the notorious 2013 Carnival Triumph cruise that became a media circus after a relentless series of disasters onboard. Not for the squeamish, then, but if you can stomach this it’ll put you off cruises for life.
Discover Primal Horrors in Poop Cruise
The trailer has 21 million views and Trainwreck’s documentary shot straight to number 1 in Netflix’s streaming chart.
Frankly, the very idea of going on a cruise is just a living nightmare for us. We can’t think of anything worse. If forced into it, we’d spend the entire cruise in our bedroom, rising at 6am to beat the crowds and see the sunrise, then return to our room to hide.
Some of the people who feature throughout Poop Cruise are exactly the sort of people we’d expect to see on a cruise. You know:
- Extroverted
- Outgoing
- Ready to party
- Ready to dance
- Wanting to sunbathe
Good for them, and all that, but we’re introverts and it doesn’t make sense to us standing on a cruise deck, drunk, sunburnt, and dancing in close quarters to terrible chart music. Hard pass.
Also, one of them can’t go more than a single sentence without mentioning he was engaged, there with his fiancé, and desperate to impress his future father in law. This was 12 years ago and he really, really labours on the point.
These people are vital to the documentary, though, as through them viewers get to vicariously live through the total nightmare that was the 2013 cruise. It’s a bit like the documentary Class Action Park (2020), but with fewer injuries and more effluence.
And the disgust factor will be off the charts with this one. Guaranteed. But in a funny way! So, it all balances itself out.
The News Dubs the Crisis “Poop Cruise”
Once the American media latched on to the news, this became one of 2013’s most hotly covered stories.
After a fire onboard the cruise Carnival Triumph’s engine room, on February 10th 2013 at 5:30am, the ship was left with no energy. The fire was put out by the sprinklers onboard, but the damage to the ship’s electronics was so extreme the crew and passengers were, essentially, left stranded at sea.
Whilst they waited to be rescued, the harsh reality of zero electricity kicked in.
Food quickly went off, cabins had no lights, and the ship’s toilet flush systems stopped working. Passengers were instructed to take a wazz in the shower units to cover No. 1s. But for No. 2s, there was a different problem altogether.
As the days stranded at sea wore on, the crew invented a strategy to deal with the need for excrement. They distributed to all passengers red plastic bags to fill up and place in bins.
Other passengers tried more inventive techniques, as documented by the below former (often very amusing) chef onboard the ship.
Alongside this issue, a Lord of the Flies type battle for survival kicked off. Passengers dragged their cabin mattresses out onto the main deck of the boat and a free-for-all for territory and food began.
Once tug boats arrived to bring the cruise ship back to land, this tilted the craft at an obtuse angle as it rocked back and forth to mainland.
You can probably figure out what that led to, but let’s spell it out anyway! Raw sewage backed up into the corridors and deck areas.
In total, they were stuck out there for eight days.
It later turned out the ship had enjoyed four previous engine room fires between 1999 and 2012.
Watching Poop Cruise, it’s astonishing just how many atrocious twists and turns this nightmare holiday took. We should imagine a fair few people were left with PTSD on this one, as amusing/grotesque as the story is.
It’s directed with a lively pace by James Ross but, as you may expect, isn’t going to be for everyone.
We found it very fascinating, at times very funny, and others just utterly horrifying. Again, this will put you off going on a cruise (or least it has with us, but then we didn’t need much convincing anyway). Well worth a watch if you want to be amused and disgusted! Quite the unique combo.
