Three years ago this month, we had an environmentally-themed slate of monster posts. Since it doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out all of our ecological problems in that time (not for lack of trying, I assume!), I think it’s time to pull up another bunch for what you can call Eco-Horror II: The Revenge.
There were of course, a number of movies coincidentally similar to Jaws in the mid-to-late seventies, many of them produced by prolific Italian film companies/exploitation houses—the animal attack movie business was bustling. Not one to avoid capitalizing on a trend, producer Dino De Laurentiis joined in on the good times in the year following the box office success of his King Kong remake (ol’ Dino D went really hard into creature features in 1977, with previous series subject The White Buffalo releasing two months before the one I’m writing about here), and along with screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Segio Donati (both who contributed to the scripts of classic spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,, among many others) and director Michael Anderson (previously of Logan’s Run) gave us the next logical step after a movie about a shark: a movie about an orca. But unlike certain later orca movies (that had cartoons spin-offs where the whale fights an evil cyborg), Orca—sometimes subtitled The Killer Whale for all the dummies who don’t know what an orca is—is not some family-friendly story about human and animals learning to respect each other, but a violent revenge thriller. The gimmick here is that the one seeking revenge is the whale—so this is less Jaws with a whale than it is Death Wish with a whale (and who was the producer on Death Wish? Why, Dino De Lautentiis!) In a sea of killer marine life movies, that immediately makes this one stand out.
I always love it when a movie tries to one-up a more popular movie, and Orca opens with a prime example: a duo of marine biologists working in the ocean are menaced by a great white shark, only for the shark to be quickly and mercilessly torn to shreds by a group of whales (not to be outdone, Jaws 2, which released a year after this, had an orca killed by its shark—but for all you can say about Orca, it’s certainly more interesting than any Jaws sequel.) The head biologist Rachel, played with proper cold scientific authority by Charlotte Rampling (who narrates parts of the movie for some added purple prose), and her assistant (Robert Carradine, youngest of the Carradine Bros.), meet with a group of ocean hunters who were tracking the shark in hopes of taking it alive and selling it to an aquarium, but become far more enamoured with bagging one of those whales instead. The captain of the ship is Nolan (future Dumbledore Richard Harris, who apparently had an interesting time working on this movie), leading a crew consisting of Bo Derek (playing the sort of character that Bo Derek always played in movies), Peter Hooten (television’s Dr. Strange! Look it up!), and veteran actor Keenan Wynn, and none seem to listen to Rachel’s moral objections to their goals, or her warning about the whales’ intelligence—we get a whole scene where she explains to a packed classroom how orcas are probably smarter than us, have a better communication system, and are just all-around better than humans. Why doesn’t she just go marry an orca, then! So the crew go after the whales that they saw mince the shark, but in the process of trying to spear the male whale, they instead get the female, which attempts to kill itself using the ship’s propeller—they pull it up onto the ship, but before they could cut it loose, it ends up aborting its offspring, in a moment simultaneously ridiculous and disgusting. Nolan is so disturbed by this that he uses a hose to blow the dead whale fetus off the deck, and needless to say, the male of that pair (and we are told repeatedly by everyone that orcas are monogamous and devoted to their mates) is not particularly happy with this.
Most of the movie is centred around Nolan gradually going insane as the whale screws with him specifically, doing many things a whale would not or could not do. This begins with dragging old Keenan Wynn into the sea, but it soon escalates to include activities such as:
-Pushing his mate’s corpse onto a beach to remind him of what he did
-Sinking docked boats
-Breaking glass with his whale song
-Causing a gas pipeline/refinery to explode
Since I’ve seen this movie before, the pipeline explosion didn’t feel as out of nowhere as the first time, but I was still surprised that it happened long before the final act. That’s usually something you save for the climax, I’d think.
There’s plenty of underwater footage and scenes of trained orcas, named Yaka and Nepo fyi, doing their thing and close-ups on the whale’s eye (is it meant to look inhuman, or sympathetic? It’s a genuine ambiguity, except when they attempt to make it look like it’s crying) as well as some silly special effects shots. We have a whale cam that is pretty clearly on a rubber model (used when the orca is ramming things, which he does quite frequently), and several times where they splice footage of the whale jumping out of the water next to separate footage of the background, giving it a strange edited GIF effect (or like a less colourful Lisa Frank image.) The whale’s main murder trick is to jump up and chomp people (or, more specifically, a dummy), which is intentionally cut quickly but is still never convincing—at least it’s not the central focus of the whale-based terror until the final act.
Rachel gives Nolan a book on whale biology and mythology that he becomes increasingly obsessed with, growing further and further convinced that the orca wants him to return to the sea so they can have a one-on-one confrontation. He is further convinced of this by Will Sampson, once again cast as the sole indigenous person who exists to explain the traditional beliefs of his people, a far less substantial role than the one he had in The White Buffalo just two months before. What’s interesting is that the fishermen in the village also immediately turn against Nolan, because superstitious or not, they know the more practical truth that an angry whale sticking around scares away all the fish and makes their jobs harder, and they issue subtle and non-subtle threats until Nolan and his gang get out of there. Despite this movie being set in Newfoundland, though, there isn’t a single Newfie accent among them.
Part of Nolan’s growing monomania, despite all his early attempts to write the whale revenge off or drink it away, comes from him identifying with the orca: his wife and unborn child had died in a collision with a drunk driver years earlier. He repeatedly mumbles about how they’re the same, and how he is the whale’s drunk driver, because this movie is very subtle, you see (which begins with the whale lecture, where aside from simply sucking up to whales, also explains much of the plot before it happens.) As goofy as it is, Harris does bring out the tragic dimension to this role, creating a person consumed by his guilt but terrified at the obvious solution to it—what at first seemed like a classic example of a money-grubbing exploiter of nature becomes a reverse Ahab of sorts, and someone who is full of immediate regret for what he’s done. It’s not complexity, but it’s not not complexity, either.
After witnessing so much violence (after Bo Derek breaks her leg early in the movie, the whale eventually bites the broken leg off—which is pretty mean, but I guess less mean than if he bit off the non-broken leg) and property damage orca-strated by the whale (you’ve probably stopped reading now, haven’t you?), Nolan and the rest of the cast decide to play the animal’s game and head out to the water, following it into the frozen north. After every character but Nolan and Rachel is taken out (she seems oddly more distressed at Nolan’s crew member being killed than her own assistant), the whale forces them out of the boat by pushing an iceberg into it, and him and Nolan have their fated battle, which concludes with the whale using his tail to flip his opponent against the side of a glacier. It’s probably not the finishing move people were expecting, I bet, but the whale gets points for creativity. Although nothing in this movie is particularly tense, the man-against-whale fight on the ice is another one of those wacky things that elevates this to a certain level of schlock.
It is fascinating that after Jaws and its particular man-against-nature plot, some of the things trying to capitalize on it chose to subvert the dynamic and have us sympathize with the animal—it’s the same trick Hook Jaw pulled as well. The question of motivation was never a factor in Jaws, and for the most part the idea of human culpability (which is a major recurring theme in all eco-horror)is mostly about how we respond to an uncontrollable disaster in order to save human life, not whether we did anything to deserve it. A movie like Orca changes that, and puts the onus on the humans for needlessly invoking the wrath of another animal. It’s probably easier to get audiences on the side of an orca, if only because they’re mammals, their intelligence is common knowledge, and they put on such delightful shows for our benefit probably, so in that way Orca has an advantage over other killer animal movies from the period. It’s jumbled into a very B-movie script, but there’s an especially unique perspective here of presenting this animal as both scary and also far closer to human than the characters in the movie, or us in the audience, would like to acknowledge—it’s scary because it’s so identifiable to us, “the only other animal that kills for revenge.”
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