Jaws with a soul -- ORCA: The Killer Whale

 

It wouldn't be right to kick off this blog with any other than the very movie that inspired me to start the blog in the first place. So let's dive in!

This country of ours may be divided on many issues, but one of the few things we can all agree on is JAWS. Even those who don't love it are still affected by it. All these years later, and we're still skittish every time we go swimming. Spielberg didn't invent the creature feature, but he set the bar inconceivably high for every monster movie that came after it. So, naturally, the following years brought many, many poor attempts at recapturing Spielberg's magic formula. A few of these were decently received and are fondly remembered; but most clung like hungry ramora fish to JAWS' 25 ft underbelly, riding on his massive appeal and hoping to snap up a few crumbs of his glory, only to shrivel and eventually die off.

ORCA is one of the more notorious of the JAWS rip-offs, largely because it sounds so fucking stupid. Even adding an ominous "The Killer Whale" to its title does it no favors. Predictably, it did poorly at the box office and quietly retreated to its new life on home video. This was a blessing for ORCA, since in the age of the video store, you didn't need a terribly compelling title or even a shred of plot to draw an audience. All that truly mattered was the box art! Those colors! Those teeth! Those eerily expressive eyes!

This was a truly eye-catching video for a certain 10-year-old girl who had seen FREE WILLY enough times to have it memorized and still cry. I was crazy about whales when I was a kid, especially orcas (and I still am to this day, only now it's on a much more scientific, spiritual, and outraged activist level). But it's funny how horror movies can change you, nip at your most vulnerable parts and make you question innocent things, especially at that age. Despite being so intrigued by the box, I could never bring myself to actually watch the movie. Even for a cheesy B-movie, it suggested a level of brutality I could not yet handle, at least not with my delicate 10-yr-old sensibilities. Many years later, I encountered it again on Netflix Instant. The cover art was now reduced to a tall dorsal fin slicing through dark water--meh--but it still brought Movie Gallery memories rushing back to me, of standing frozen in the stare of that furious whale, knowing I didn't have the courage to face him on the screen.

Now, I am one of the not-so-many that actually defends this flop as an overlooked gem. Despite its contrived plot, rail-thin characters, repetitive use of stock footage, all topped with a heaping pile of melodrama, it is simply too hard not to love it.

The plot, as it is, is thus: wily fisherman Captain Nolan (the late great Richard Harris) seeks out big fish to sell in order to pay off his massive debts. While hunting great white sharks, he and his crew cross paths with sexy marine biologist Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), who tells them they shouldn't be fishing in the area due to the delicate whale population. She lectures him about the nobility and intelligence of the animals, which only makes Nolan see dollar signs. Now wise to the power and rarity of the killer whale, Nolan sets his sights on catching one and selling it to an aquarium. He eventually comes upon a couple of orcas and shoots a harpoon, aiming for the male. He instead hits the female, which leads into one of the most horrifying, dramatic, and helplessly funny sequences put to film.

Iconic.

After such heartless carnage, the surviving orca swears revenge against Nolan, threatening his boat, his home, and his crew. In an appearance that's baffling even for this film, Chief himself (Will Sampson) appears and interprets the whale's intentions through First Settler sorcery: the whale apparently wants to settle things on his own turf. Nolan eventually reveals to Rachel that years before, a drunk driver killed his wife and child, and now he has done the same to this whale, and he's starting to feel pretty bad about it. The orca leads Nolan and company on a merry chase all the way out to the Arctic to hold their final showdown. The film ends with the whale overpowering the crew, destroying the boat, and dragging an utterly humbled Nolan into the water and flipping him like a pancake straight into an ice wall. The whale then serenely dives below the ice and swims out into the frozen sea, finally at peace.

One of the more unique and interesting aspects of this movie is that the "monster" is an actual character. From the opening shot, we spend a great deal of the movie with the whales, to the point that the scenes between human characters feel like filler. The film grinds to a halt whenever we check in what's going on topside, almost as if the film itself acknowledges that these scenes only exist out of obligation. I believe the romance between the two whales a hell of a lot more than I believe beautiful brilliant Rachel falling for a crusty old fisherman who is actively hunting the animals she studies. Frankly, it seems like someone was shoehorning in their own thinly veiled Quint/Hooper slash fiction into a plot that could quite do without it.

Despite the orcas largely being depicted in clips of stock footage, they are edited in a way that really does bring sympathy to them. It's hard not to smile at the images of two whales in love, as silly as it seems, and it's hard not to feel heartbroken at the brutality that tears them apart. In my ideal ORCA movie, we would get the entire experience from Daddy Orca's point of view: many eerie shots of looking up at a boat from underwater, the muffled sounds of explosions and screams above the surface, lonely whale songs hummed into empty blueness. But alas, whales don't speak English, so Bo Derek pops up now and then to bring us up to speed.

She doesn't get naked in this movie, but something does come off in a hurry.

All the JAWS similarities aside, it's likely this movie suffered largely from the fact that people generally aren't afraid of whales. I mean, sure, if you're like me and the idea of any large dark mass arising from the unknowable depths of the sea makes your blood run cold, then sure, whales are just as scary as sharks. But unlike with sharks, rationally we know that whales don't really pose a threat to us. The late 70's and early 80's gave way to an enormous amount of new information about orcas, and the more we learned, the less we fixated on that "killer" moniker. More than anything, the idea of a bloodthirsty killer whale only got funnier over time, as the image of the orca became inexorably linked with that of a cuddly theme park attraction.

Cut to:

Aw, we were all having such a good time...

The shocking documentary BLACKFISH did more than effectively make everyone hate Sea World; it opened our eyes to the idea that these animals have consciousness. They feel love, grief, and rage, and we have hunted them and put them in cages. And they have retaliated in a big bad way, time and again.

Knowing what we know now, is the idea of a heartbroken creature of such size, strength and intelligence seeking revenge such a farfetched idea? Who knows, maybe if we had listened to the message of ORCA all those years ago, things might be different now...

Still more believable than JAWS: THE REVENGE.

I'd say it's about time to give ORCA another chance. Sure, it's nowhere near the sheer goodness of JAWS, but who could hope to be? Sure, it's cheesy and soap opera level dramatic given the subject matter, but some of us (me) get really emotional when it comes to animals, so in that sense, it fits. It's a Man vs. Nature story that lends sympathy and pathos to its creature unlike anything I've seen. The story being told by that stock footage and sappy music is reason enough to see this movie and treasure it.

That, and the Orca Evil Eye.

Make this a meme.