Jaws spawned so many bad imitators, but 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale might have the most unusual crew. The S.S. Bumpo (no, really) is captained by Richard Harris (who I will always first associate with the horrible song “MacArthur Park”), with Keenan Wynn as his second (and I will always associate him with Dr. Strangelove) and Bo Derek as…well, I’m not sure what, but she’s there and wearing more clothes than in anything else I’ve ever seen her in. I like to think Wynn was judging all sea creatures as “preverts” while waiting for Harris, in the crow’s nest on the mast, to yell “Land ho! I spy a cake melting in the rain!” Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss they ain’t.
Harris has been trying to catch an orca to sell to an aquarium. An expert played by Charlotte Rampling is telling him he won’t succeed, as they are too smart to be captured. I guess the specimens at places like Sea World just chose to be there, jumping from the ocean into the pools without any external motivation. At one point, there’s a lengthy scene of a lecture she’s delivering to college students in a classroom, where she talks about the sophistication of the whales’ language and that they would find our comparatively primitive tongue to be “retarded”. Whoa! Hold up there with that fancy pants, high-falootin’, edumacated talkin’, doc!
We also learn in this lecture, “Like most human beings, they have a profound instinct for revenge.” This foreshadows the integral element of the plot, where a male orca exacts revenge on Harris for killing his mate. If only Harris had listened to Derek, her voice apparently dubbed by a ten year old girl when she says, “Do you realize whales are monogamous? We could be busting up a happy family.” I imagine her character’s mind being like a montage of Trapper Keeper imagery from the 80’s, and her dream being to have her own pony.
The complexities of the killer whale’s revenge are jaw-droppingly daft. An entire sea port town is in danger of being destroyed by it unless Harris comes out into the open and fights it mano-a-flipper. I laughed hard for a looong time when it conspires to sever a pipe carrying fuel to the town, which then catches the village on fire and explodes the fuel tanks. It then does a few victory lap jumps out of the water while an inferno rages in the background. I wondered when it was going to start committing identity theft. I was waiting for Harris to relocate to Kansas but have the whale show up somehow: “The calls from the killer whale are coming from inside the house!” By the end, the whale will be doing things like shoving an entire iceberg towards Harris’s ship. Given enough time, it would probably be running a multinational crime organization from a castle in the Swiss alps and threatening to use lasers to slice Sean Connery into cubes. Just imagine how different Goldfinger could have been: “Do you expect me to talk, Mr. Orca?” “AIEEEEE-crick-crick-AIEEEEEEEEEEAIIIIIIII!”
The effects vary wildly. Most are bad in both concept and execution, such as the moment the orca sees Harris on the prow of his ship and we see the captain superimposed over the animal’s eye. A different effect is, unfortunately, very effective, which is the surprisingly realistic dead fetus ejected by the dead killer whale when harpooned body is hanging over the ship. Perhaps the most bizarre effect in any regard is at the open, where the whales romp together in weirdly composited shots that are deeply artificial. I’m still unsure whether these are dreamlike or just plain bad.
Even the music is bad, though it appears Ennio Morricone’s score is widely regarded as the one saving grace of this feature. As for myself, just because the legendary composer worked on this, it doesn’t mean every score of his is of equal quality. Keep in mind, he churned out such compositions at an astonishing rate. One piece of music I’m hoping everybody can agree is crap is the number that plays out over the end credits. In “My Love, We Are One”, Carol Connors breathily murmurs cosmic bullshit about rainbows, moonlit waters and dawn’s first light. It makes “Nights in White Satin” sound like one of Shakespeare’s sonnets in comparison. Token Native American Will Sampson remarks of changing times that “even our gods dance to a new song”, but I sure hope it isn’t this one.
Orca just might be the worst of the Jaws rip-offs I have seen. I’m on the fence as to whether it is worse than the third and fourth installments of that other film’s run, but it is, in the right frame of mind, as fun to mock as those. What is most peculiar is why the makers of Jaws: The Revenge didn’t realize their movie, with it’s similar plot (as stated in that title), would be just as ridiculous. How strange it is that a film could rip-off another, and then a sequel to the original would eventually emulate the imitator. It’s like if The White Stripes reunited to do a tribute to The Black Keys.
Dir: Michael Anderson
Starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray