There’s something to be said about truth in advertising, and Killer Whale certainly delivers what it promises. There is an orca on the loose, and it does terrorize Maddie (Virginia Gardner, Halloween 2018, Project Almanac) and Trish (Mel Jarnson, Mortal Kombat), a pair of stranded twenty-somethings on vacation. It’s also a relatively low-budget affair, so there is, as you might expect, a limited amount of screen time for the murderous marine mammal, and when it does appear, the results are something less refined and realistic than in its major studio creature feature counterparts.
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It’s not easy to pull off this type of VFX-contingent movie with limited resources, but they can still be effective if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, or provide campy pleasures if the effects are real dodgy. In the case of Killer Whale, it does what so many similar films do, it focuses more on the characters than the wild animal. That’s great, being invested in characters is always going to ground what’s essentially a monster movie. But the script from Brechin and Katharine McPhee overcompensates, piling on layer after layer of detail and one plot complication after another just to get the protagonists to the main part of the story.
Here’s what I mean. A year ago, Maddie was a promising cellist about to graduate college and start her perfect life with her perfect boyfriend. A boyfriend who is murdered in a botched robbery that leaves her mostly deaf. She understandably withdraws into herself. Trish is a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks, her words, who is now a wealthy social media influencer. She arrives to take Maddie on a surprise restorative dream vacation to visit a famous orca named Ceto, who Maddie was obsessed with, at a janky Sea World knock off. They meet a hunky local, ingest a bunch of drugs, and break into the rundown theme park, where they see Ceto kill a man, which is, we learn, not the first time. The next morning, the trio jetskis out to a remote, supposedly cursed atoll for some fun in the sun. Little do they know that over the course of the previous evening the angry murder whale has somehow been dumped by the park owners in the same lagoon. Things go south from there.
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That is act one, that is the set up. By the time we get to the main narrative thrust, we’re bogged down in all this minutia. And it’s all window-dressing, superficial detail that comes at you fast and furious, but that never adds up to anything substantial. For the most part, Maddie and Trish are little more than a collection of facts. We’re told their personalities rather than seeing them for ourselves. For a few, brief moments, the film shows a spark, where they’re two estranged friends reconnecting , dealing with significant trauma, and keeping secrets in a messy, touching snapshot of friendship without all the surrounding bluster. But that doesn’t last. Gardner and Jarnson do what they can with what they have, but ultimately, you’re left with unfulfilled potential as the core duo cling to a rock in front of a green screen ocean.
I do love it in movies with killer giant animals where the beast in question is able to sneak around like a ninja and pop up behind a character like a supernatural Snoop Dogg in Bones. That’s all over the latter Jurassic Park/World movies and it’s all over here. Maddie and Trish will be bickering and all of a sudden there is Ceto, licking her lips in case they get a little too close to the water. That’s as fun as the movie ever gets.
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Low-budget nature-gone-wild movies like this are a difficult proposition. Even in the best circumstances, it’s an uphill battle. For every Crawl we get a Requin or two. Sadly, there’s not much to recommend Killer Whale. Things happen in the most unnatural way, characters make illogical decisions, even by horror movie standards, there’s little tension, zero thrills, and no emotional engagement. It’s not even silly or goofy enough to be fun in a B-movie, Saturday-afternoon-cable-discovery kind of way. [Grade: C-]
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