Two friends find themselves trapped on a rock in the ocean with a circling orca whale preventing their escape.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jo-Anne Brechin
Starring: Virginia Gardner, Melanie Jarnson, Mitchell Hope
That Virginia Gardner has only gone and done it again! After getting stuck atop a giant radio tower in Fall, now she's trapped on a rock off the coast with an angry circling orca whale preventing her from escaping. Director Jo-Anne Brechin's Killer Whale owes much to Fall's template, right down to a BFF revealing a guilty secret at the most inopportune moment. It's also essentially a reworking of the blonde on a rock thriller The Shallows, swapping out a shark for the decidedly less threatening eponymous mammal.
The protagonists of this current crop of survival thrillers are obliged to carry some traumatic baggage, usually involving a deceased loved one. For Gardner's Maddie it's a dead boyfriend. In the prologue we see Isaac Crawley's Chad (yes, they really named him Chad!) cut down in his prime when he foolishly plays the hero and attempts to foil an armed robbery at the diner where Maddie works the late shift. There are several unintentionally hilarious moments peppered throughout Killer Whale, none more so than the awkwardly staged Final Destination-esque manner in which Chad meets his maker.
A year later and Maddie is suffering from TRAUMA, and is also now reliant on a hearing aid thanks to a shotgun being fired right next to her ear in the aforementioned TRAUMATIC incident. Her bestie Trish (Mel Jarnson) appears out of the blue and talks Maddie into joining her for a getaway to Thailand. Once there the girls find their fates intertwining with that of Ceto, an orca whale that is the star attraction at a local water park. Taking a trip out to some rocks off the coast, the lasses find themselves trapped when Ceto is released from captivity after a series of incidents that resulted in dead water park staff members. That bloody fish seems to have it in for the girls, refusing to let them swim ashore.
Dozens of swimmers are chomped on by sharks every year, so it's no surprise that we get a new shark movie on what feels like a weekly basis. Despite their scary moniker, killer whales are comparative wusses. The only good killer whale movie is the under-rated 1977 gem Orca, which makes it clear that the whale is getting revenge for how humans have treated her kids. As though terrified of a Greenpeace boycott, Killer Whale ties itself in knots reminding us that killer whales don't usually pose a threat to humans, which isn't what you want to hear about the antagonist of a survival thriller. And yet Ceto behaves exactly like the Great White from Jaws, leaping out of the water and snapping at dangling ankles at every given opportunity. This is really just a shark movie in drag.
The characters are laughably written, acting in a manner that doesn't echo realistic human behaviour. Early on the girls break into the water park to take a gander at Ceto (Maddie figures it's more ethical than buying a ticket and financially endorsing the creature's confinement), where Maddie sees the freshly chewed corpse of a janitor floating in the water. Somehow this doesn't affect her in the slightest, and off she goes jet-skiing with her buddy the very next morning. Cold Maddie, cold.
A recurring problem with these recent survival thrillers is a lack of potential victims. There's only one obvious piece of chum here in Josh (Mitchell Hope), the hunky Aussie who unwittingly takes the girls out to meet their fate. This means the bulk of the movie leaves us with Maddie and Trish sitting on a rock getting slowly sunburnt. Brechin fails to manufacture any suspenseful sequences, and some of the greenscreen ocean backdrops are reminiscent of the rooftop scenes from The Room. A few unintended laughs aside, you're unlikely to have a whale of a time with this one.
Killer Whale is on UK/ROI VOD from May 18th.
