Note: This focus will be on horror/thrillers that have featured the LGBTQIA community and/or have themes as June is Pride Month. While he portrays Paul, a supporting character, Peter Hooten is an openly gay man. I also felt this was appropriate with reports of orcas damaging boats.
With reports coming out that orcas are destroying boat rudders off yachts and speed boats, it’s shows you just how smart (and pissed off) these creatures of the sea are. For decades, they have been used in sea amusement parks for our amusement. But following the release of Blackfish about the orca Tilikum, there was a push to end these types of attractions.
Orca or otherwise known as Orca The Killer Whale opened two years and one month after Jaws. Like a lot of movies of the era, it tried to capitalize off the man vs. nature story that Jaws had. Movies like The Food of the Gods, Kindgom of the Spiders, Piranha and Alligator, all portrayed animals that had been somehow genetically altered to attack and they were killing people.
But Orca takes a different approach to the format. Famed Hollywood producer Dino De Laurentiis after seeing Jaws reportedly called producer Luciano Vicenzoni in the middle of the night and said he wanted to do a movie like Jaws. However, as in Jaws and the imitators where humans were the victims, here they are the villains. Orcas aren’t really whales, but belong to the dolphin family. And they are highly intelligent, even reported working together to get their prey.
The plot in Orca involves Captain Nolan (Richard Harris) who is an Irish Canadian living off the shores of Nova Scotia who captures marine life to sell to pay off the mortgage on his boat and hopefully return to Ireland. One day, while tracking a great white shark, they notice one going after a young marine biologist, Ken (Robert Carradine), who had been deep diving with the older and more experienced Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), a cetologist. The shark is attacked and killed by an orca.
Nolan witnesses this and becomes interested in catching an orca, even though he doesn’t seem to be all too familiar with them. Despite criticism from one of his ship crew members, Annie (Bo Derek), that orcas mate for life and he’d be breaking up a family, Nolan is determined to capture a male. Unfortunately, when they spot some orcas, his harpoon nicks the male’s dorsal fin and hits his mate. When they pull it on board, the female miscarries with the fetus falling on the deck much to the shock of everyone including the male orca who watches nearby.
Nolan washes the fetus overboard but the orca continues to cause damage to the boat as the still alive body of its mate is still hanging. A crew member, Novak (Keenan Wynn), climbs up and cuts it down, but the male jumps up and grabs him with its teeth pulling him under water killing him. With his boat damaged, Nolan and his crew take port at the nearest fishing community, but get a cold welcome. As Al Swain (Scott Walker) tells them, an orca off the shores will drive the fish away. As leader of the local union, he asks Nolan to kill the orca or leave the community because it will follow him.
The orca pushes its mate toward the shores where it’s body is found by many including Bedford and Jacob Umilak (Will Sampson) an Mi’kmaq man, who like Bedford, believes the orca wants revenge because his ancestors have dealt with them. It begins to attack the boats in the harbor but not Nolan’s. The locals work to fix up Nolan’s boat but tell him that he can only be allowed to leave town is by water.
Some of the things the male orca does to exact its revenge does seem to be questionable. While it’s easy for the orca to spot which boat is Nolan’s and which isn’t, there’s a scene in which it attacks Nolan’s seafront house by knocking down the beams that are underwater. But how does the orca know where Nolan lives? Other times, it seems to just pop up out of the water to attack someone without knowing where they’d be.
While it’s a man vs. nature imitation of Jaws, it’s also a twist on the revenge movies which were popular at the time as well. Nolan is gullible and niave but he finally realizes he must atone for his sins leading the orca north in his ship to the Artic Circle. While it doesn’t have the suspense of Jaws, it still manages to be a good B-movie imitation. The orca killing the great white shark is obviously a dig at Jaws. And in Jaws 2, an orca was killed by a shark to get back at this movie.
Despite looking like a rip-off, a lot of careful and diligent work was done in the production. Real orcas, Yako and Nepo, were used but the crew also used artificial rubber models for some scenes. These proved to be so realistic that animal rights activists were fooled when they saw crews transporting them and tried to intervene. To film the climax at the Labrador Peninsula, filmng actually took place in Malta with the set built by Mario Garbuglia. Even though he was 46, Harris insisted on doing his own stunts, some very dangerous that could have result in his death. Harris would drink heavily on the set after seeing a tabloid picture of his wife at the time, Ann Turkel, with a younger man. He got into a physical fight with Vincenzino after saying he wanted to fly to Malibu to reportedly kill them.
Reviews for Orca weren’t positive with most people noting that it was a poor knock-off of Jaws. Some reviews even noted it as a cross between Death Wish and Jaws. Needless to say, audiences also stayed away as the movie only made $14.7 million in North America. Now, many years later it seems to be a warning on the dangers of messing with marine life. Jaws actually encouraged shark-hunting expeditions so much sharks are considered endangered. Also, views changed as people and organizations pushed to save the whales in the 1980s.
I think maybe the bad reviews and box office could’ve been because we’re following Nolan and his crew, who are the bad people. Not to give anything away on how it ends, but the orca is the victor. People probably were expecting Nolan to blow up the orca.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 