Orca (1977) – Review

With the success of Steven Spielberg’s Summer Blockbuster Jaws, many a film producer scrambled to cash in on that hit with various rip-offs and famed Italian filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis wasn’t going to miss his shot at this burgeoning subgenre, so he turned to his producer friend Luciano Vincenzoni and requested that he “Find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.” The result of this search was the film Orca a movie about a vengeance-seeking killer whale and its Captain Ahab-type protagonist in what could be considered one of the classier Jaws imitators.

The film’s protagonist is Captain Nolan (Richard Harris) an Irish Canadian who hopes to catch a great white shark to help pay off the mortgage on his boat but when he sees said shark being killed by an orca he switches targets to the killer whale and our movie is off and running. Where Orca differs from many of its fellow eco-horror movies is that the motivations for all the death and destruction are of a more personal nature. In Nolan’s attempt at capturing a killer whale, he accidentally harpoons the female of the species which not only results in her death but that of her unborn child, which horrifically spills out onto the deck of Nolan’s boat, and thus it is the mate of the murdered female orca and child who propels the film’s narrative.

Note: The male orca has his dorsal fin nicked by Nolan’s harpoon which gives the audience a nice identifying feature.

The scene of the female dying a rather bloody death – she kind of commits suicide by running along the ship’s propeller before being hauled out of the sea – is fairly hard to watch and the fetus of the baby orca spilling out onto the deck makes this a film best avoided by younger audience members, but it does make this entry into the genre rather unique as for the most part the viewer is on the side of the killer whale because if some shit-heel human murders the mate and child you certainly can’t fault the creature’s desire for vengeance. What is even stranger here is that we are also given a backstory where we learn that Nolan’s wife and kid were killed by a drunk driver and the script even comments that Nolan himself is the orca’s drunk driver and that “He loved his family… more than I loved mine.”

“I should have hunted down and eaten all of the drunk driver’s friends, that’s true love.”

With this film, we have what could be considered a reverse Moby Dick as the killer whale is the more obsessed character and Nolan only goes full Captain Ahab during the movie’s last act, for the bulk of the film Nolan has no desire to hunt down the orca, and it’s the killer whale who forces the final confrontation. And how exactly does a killer whale force a person to sail out to sea for a big showdown? Well, this is easily the silliest aspect of the movie as we have the killer whale economically targeting the local community by driving the fish away and sinking all the boats in the harbour while leaving Nolan’s boat untouched.  How a marine mammal understands the economic pressures this will cause is a true mystery but it gets worse.  The pièce de résistance is when the creature breaks a pipeline, then knocks over a kerosene lantern which then ignites the spilled fuel, resulting in the local refinery exploding.

Is this a killer whale or Professor Moriarty?

In one of the film’s earlier scenes, we get killer whale expert Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling) giving a lecture where she discusses the fact that the orca has the same intelligence and capacity for emotions as a human but this does not explain how a marine animal would understand even the concept of fire let alone how to start one. Yet not only does this genius killer whale recognize the mechanics of arson it somehow also knows that these actions are harming the fishing community which would then result in the residents forcing Nolan to go out to sea and face the orca. I’ve come across my fair share of movie bullshit in my time but this one takes the cake, it’s one thing to imbue an animal with human characteristics and motivations, and I’m sure as a species the killer whale is a very bright and emphatic animal, but the leaps in logic this particular orca makes are beyond the pale ridiculous.

“From Hell’s heart, I laugh at thee!”

Where this film really fails in its inability to create any real suspense, the film has a total body count of five victims of the killer whale – excluding poor Bo Derek who only loses a leg and not her life – and all of these kills are so abrupt that we the audience barely have time to react before they’re over. There are no scenes of the orca stalking its prey, instead, the creature just leaps out of the water to pluck some poor sod off the deck. Aside from the aforementioned leg chomping the deaths are also rather antiseptic with the killer whale going for quick rather bloodless kills, and the film’s one Native American character (Will Sampson) is even killed by an avalanche of ice and not by the razor-sharp teeth of the orca.

Are we awarding the killer whale points for creativity?

Stray Observations:

• Much of the underwater footage of the killer whales features clear blue-green water which makes it quite obvious that this was shot at Marineland in an aquarium and not off the east coast of Canada.
• Some shots of the orca show a drooping dorsal fin but this indicates the animal has lived in captivity as it would not be found on an orca in the wild.
• The 1978 sequel Jaws 2 featured a scene where a killer whale’s carcass is found and believed to have been the work of a great white shark, which was a pretty clear rebuttal to this film.
• Our introduction to the killer whale is in a scene where it brutally kills a Great White Shark, a not-very-subtle shot at Spielberg’s film.
• Actor Will Sampson fills the bill as the all-knowing indigenous person who often pops up in these kinds of films to explain the creature’s spiritual nature. What’s odd here is that he joins up with Richard Harris in his quest to kill the orca.
• Charlotte Rampling’s character makes a rather strange statement about killer whales, “This is without challenge the most powerful animal on the globe.” Elephants are easily the most powerful animal on the globe but even if we were to narrow the field down to the most powerful sea creatures the orca still wouldn’t win as the saltwater crocodile is easily the stronger of the two. Someone needs to check her scientific credentials.
• The orca pushes around an iceberg that would probably weigh in and around 100,000 tons, not something even a super strong killer whale could do.
• The film ends with the orca tipping the ice so that Nolan will slide down towards its mighty maw, much like Quint’s fate at the end of Jaws, but to avoid that comparison the movie has the killer whale then smack Nolan through the air and into the side of an iceberg.

Richard Harris seen here reaching the film’s tipping point.

I’ll give director Michael Anderson credit for not making a blatant rip-off of Jaws as this film’s themes differ greatly from that of the basic “Man against Nature” aspect of Spielberg’s film, and the animatronic killer whale was truly impressive and a definite improvement over Bruce the Shark, but where this film really drops the ball is in providing us with relatable characters. Nolan’s harpooning of killer whales for money makes Richard Harris’s character a hard one to sympathize with and then we get Charlotte Rampling’s as a scientist who loves and respects the creatures but ends up in a “relationship” with the man whose very profession she despises. At one point she is exclaiming, “You’ll murder him – you’ll sit here safe on the jetty, and shoot him through the eye? You’re not a man, you’re an animal! Its creatures like you science should be observing!” but then at the end the film she’s screaming, “Jesus, shoot!” clearly having joined the “Humans First” movement by this point.

“Smile, you son of a bitch.”

There are certainly worse Jaws rip-offs out there but this entry does have one of the more ridiculous premises and though I do give Dino De Laurentiis and Michael Anderson credit for not stinting on shots of the killer whales in action, animatronic or real, the film still fails at generating the kind of suspense and thrills this type of story needs to function. Orca is one of those weird entries in the eco-horror genre that fails despite having a great cast and some amazing visual effects