Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Orca / The Killer Whale / USA / 1977

Midway through Jaws there is a scene in which Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper inspects the hull of a small fishing boat; the moment is bathed in an eerie green hue and completed when the body of a fisherman falls into view through a jagged hole. Set along the New England coast, the scene is one of the movie’s most famous; it was also filmed entirely in a swimming pool. For a young director, even one with as much promise as Spielberg, it’s expertly staged.

It’s that same simplistic attention to detail that instantly destroys Orca, a Jaws knockoff that appeared two years after Spielberg’s career-maker. Using what appears to be stock footage from an aquarium—who knew the ocean floor was so flat, clean, and cement-like?—director Michael Anderson crafts a spellbindingly awful story around one captain’s hunt for the titular animal. When he harpoons a female, and it gives birth to a human-like fetus while swinging over the deck of his boat, the father orca decides to take vengeance. (As the British biologist narrator has already explained via a dull college lecture, orcas are devotedly monogamous and ferociously vengeful.) The whale follows the captain’s boat back to harbor, where it wrecks every other craft at dock, bites the plaster-bound leg off Bo Derek, and manages to set half the coastal town ablaze. This is a showdown, we’re told, and the final battle—between Nolan and the orca, between man and nature, between money and preservation—occurs in the Artic Ocean.

Undoubtedly one of the worst films ever made, Orca employs some of the very same cinematic tactics that made Ed Wood such a cult icon: repeated uses of the same footage—in this case, the orca leaping from the ocean in pure, unforgiving joy—terrible performances, and the sacrilegious misuse of actors like Richard Harris and Will Sampson. And while some may claim this film to be laughably bad—that is, a movie so bad it’s actually good—they forget this is a very serious attempt on the part of the filmmakers to create an actual man-versus-beast blockbuster. Wow.

by Adam Balz | Source: Paramount DVD
04 Jul 2007 10:30 PM | Comments (1)

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1. wholysnikeys@yahoo.com / 10 July 2007 / 3:56 PM

   still not as bad as Jaws 3-D…….