| What’s better than a survivalist thriller? How about when animals attack and become blood-thirsty killers set on revenge? I mean, no, I think in general that doesn’t make it better, but it is a common formula, and I respect Killer Whale’s attempt to pair it with an “animals don’t belong in captivity” theme. | | 2026
Directed by: Jo-Anne Brechin
Screenplay by: Jo-Anne Brechin, Katharine McPhee
Starring: Virginia Gardner, Mel Jarnson
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There is a scene, fairly early in the movie, where our central duo (and hot guy who is sure to die soon) break into a Sea World or Marineland type theme park in Thailand. They don’t want to financially support this type of place, but the pair did want to say hi to their former Orca friend, Ceto, previously held in a marine animal lab where they used to work back home in the States. It’s precisely at this point, not even a third into the movie, that I realize it would work so much better as an eco-terrorism thriller. The “ahh, a killer whale is hunting us, how do we survive?” is unsurprisingly, a bad premise for a movie.
For starters, if you have to film your entire movie using green screen technology, then maybe this isn’t the story you should be telling. When talking about this technology, most people talk about how hard it is on the actors, how difficult it is to give a compelling performance when they’re not in the position the character is in. But in this case, it is definitely harder on the audience. Most of the movie, more than an hour of it, takes place with two girls in their bikinis stranded on jagged rocks in the ocean being circled by a killer whale hunting the humans that had it in captivity – and it’s obvious for every single second of it, that of course they’re not actually there. It’s so obvious that you can’t pretend you don’t see the soft halo of white around the edges of their skin. The sky, for apparently days, is in a persistent threat of impending storm.
B-movies as Killer Whale is obviously supposed to be, should be more hilariously bad. But this movie keeps trying to go legit. There are minimal on-screen deaths, barely one, just blood in the water, which will be a side effect of the low budget, but is it really this hard to be B-movie bad? The characters have significant back-story. The two girls spend their time on the rocks bonding and fighting, and cathartically trying to move on from their tragic past. The types of characters that would work way better in an eco-terrorist thriller about shutting down Sea World and freeing the whales, rather than a survivalist thriller where a blood-thirsty killer whale hunts them down to kill them.
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