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Orca: The Killer Whale
Paramount // PG // September 14, 2004
List Price: $14.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
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Orca was released two years after Jaws, and it isn't timid about wearing its inspiration on its sleeve. Both movies star a mammoth sea creature tearing a sleepy ocean town apart, their ominous fins serving as a harbinger of the destruction to come. They each feature a quest to the middle of nowhere to hunt the beast, and Jaws and Orca both include a scene where a crew member slips down the boards of a sinking ship into the toothy maw lurking below. Orca isn't content with merely aping Jaws and attempts to one-up it. Taking somewhat of a similar approach as Ape a year earlier, the movie opens with a whale ramming into a great white shark, killing it with that single blow. The beast is also more destructive -- the shark in Jaws ripped apart a dock, but this killer whale tears down an entire house and destroys what looks to be an oil refinery. As much of an inspiration as Jaws clearly was, Orca owes just as much to another well-known work that's embedded itself in popular culture. Moby Dick is referenced throughout the movie, and there are obvious similarities -- a whale is responsible for the loss of a leg, an Indian is among the members of the ship's crew, and, of course, there's a crazed captain hellbent on hunting the whale to the death. Instead of marching in lockstep down the same path as Moby Dick, the roles are almost reversed. The captain is the butcher who incites the whale to seek revenge rather than the other way around. This changes as the film's climax approaches, but it's a more interesting spin than mindlessly lifting pages from Melville's novel.
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Richard Harris tackles his role well, and it's the meatiest of the lot. Nolan isn't a moustache-twitching fiend -- he's arrogant, and his actions warrant the sort of violent response he receives, but he's not painted as a single-minded, destructive monster. Nolan certainly isn't the hero of the piece, but at least in my eyes, he's not clearly the villain either. Orca also benefits from the use of real killer whales in the film. Unfortunately, it's painfully obvious that some of the underwater footage was shot in a murky tank somewhere, and the editing pays little regard to the way those shots match up with the material surrounding them. The end result has some really spectacular footage quickly followed by a dingy, barely-discernable shot of an amorphous, monochromatic blob careening across a dark blue screen. The presumably mechanical creature that interacts with the cast looks pretty convincing to me, which makes for an interesting contrast in the finale where the icy surroundings look flat-out ridiculous.
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Despite its occasionally sluggish pacing and giant leaps in logic, Orca: The Killer Whale has enough entertaining moments to make it one of the better Jaws knockoffs of the late '70s. Paramount Home Video is releasing the movie on a budget-minded DVD with anamorphic widescreen video, its original mono audio, and little else worth noting.
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Audio: Orca is presented in Dolby Digital mono, encoded at a bitrate of 192Kbps. It's a decent, if unimpressive, track: dialogue comes through reasonably clearly, and sound effects such as the whale's incessant ramming and some explosions from the havoc he wreaks are strong and robust. Morricone's forgettable score sounds thin, not roaring from my center speaker the way I was expecting. Strictly average. Orca also offers English subtitles and closed captions.
Supplements: There are no extras. The disc is packaged in a keepcase, and an insert is not provided. The DVD includes a set of static 16x9 menus and eleven chapter stops.
Conclusion: Orca: The Killer Whale doesn't come close to approaching the heights of a near-flawless film like Jaws, but it is one of the better knockoffs to emerge in the wake of Jaws' success. The movie hasn't been lavished with the special edition treatment on DVD, but the anamorphic widescreen presentation looks great, and the bargain basement sticker price makes a purchase more palatable than it would've been at a higher price point.
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