When Jaws was released in 1975 it has to be said, no pun intended, that it really opened some flood-gates. Not only was it the birth of the summer blockbuster, but it also had people chasing similar success with a variety of watery thrillers/horror movies. Orca is one of those attempts to ride that wave (okay, that pun was totally intended), and it was one of the major titles I had been meaning to watch for decades. And now I have.
What you have here is the tale of a a fisherman (Captain Nolan, played by Richard Harris) who ends up engaging in an ongoing battle with a cunning killer whale. To be fair, this whale saw the fisherman kill his partner and child, in a scene that is genuinely distressing and wild. It wasn't necessarily done with malice, but it was done nonetheless. Nolan ends up endangering himself, his colleagues (two main supporting characters played by Robert Carradine and Bo Derek), and, to use the technical term, a sea mammal expert (cetologist Rachel Bedford, played by Charlotte Rampling), but it looks inevitable that things are leading to a showdown between two determined individuals who have suffered great losses.
Directed by the fairly dependable (at this time anyway) Michael Anderson, Orca is a strange mish-mash of elements that don’t ever really fit together, but it has to be said that this is as much a strength as a weakness. Orca isn’t really what you think it is, not for the majority of the runtime, but it keeps trying to remind viewers of the film it is most indebted to. Writers Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati have a couple of excellent set-pieces to work around, including that stunning opening sequence that starts the whole chain of events, but they are unable to properly weave together the visceral thrills and the interesting exploration of characters and livelihoods shaped by the sea.
Harris isn’t doing his best work, but he’s good enough. He is certainly still very much a leading man, although Rampling matches him, and gets to share plenty of screentime with him without being reduced to an inconvenient love interest. Will Sampson is very welcome, despite his disappointingly small role, but Carradine, Derek, and Keenan Wynn are given too little to work with. The whole film would have benefited from a smaller core cast and a bigger platter of potential victims, but then it wouldn’t be the oddity that we got.
The best way to sum it up is to label it as technically mediocre, but intermittently impactful. I won’t rush to rewatch this, I may actually never rewatch it, but there are a few scenes that will stay in my mind forever, which is quite the achievement for what is an otherwise unexceptional Jaws “knock off”.
6/10
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