Orca (1977)
Chosen by Chantal who had this to say on facebook about it "here is a film that I haven't watched in years but watched a lot as a teen. So old, I admired Charlotte Rampling back then. Imagine Moby Dick, only not a borefest and minus the queerbaiting, but told from the point of view of both the Captain AND the whale. The trailer tries hard to sell it like a C-list Jaws movie but you get to see the whale a lot and get some, dare I say, insights on the animal's psyche and motives, but not in a Free Willy way. It's a horror/psychological thriller after all."
Jaws has a lot to answer for. Beyond my crippling fear of open water.
It may be one of the greatest monster movies of all time but it's monster is real, and may have impacted on the life of sharks in rather negative ways (also arguably spurred research and conservation efforts).
Orca comes across at times as a corrective to Jaws. Jaws wants nothing more than to thrill, the shark is a cipher, a killing machine with no other purpose.
Orca humanises it's monster. it spends time with it before the killing begins, and (barring a great white that gets torn apart to set up the killer whale's bona fides as a movie monster) the first horror scene involves humans as the hunters. Unfortunately like much of this odd, badly paced, po-faced film the scene is both glumly brutal and amazingly bafflingly silly.
Charlotte Rampling classes up the joint to no avail when you're dealing with a film that has a killer whale causing an on land fuel dump explosion but no real sense of fun.
Some nice footage of the whales in the wild and a Ennio Morriconne score raise the quality a little but in the world of jaws knock-offs this is no Piranaha, maybe a Grizzly at best.
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