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Directed by Michael Anderson
Written by Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni (uncredited: Robert Towne)
Produced by Luciano Vincenzoni
Music by Ennio Morricone
Cinematography by Ted Moore
Underwater Photography by J. Barry Herron
Edited by John Bloom, Marion Rothman and Ralph E. Winters
Production Design by Mario Garbuglia
Special Effects by Alex C. Weldon

Cast
Richard Harris (Captain Nolan)
Charlotte Rampling (Rachel Bedford)
Will Sampson (Umilak)
Bo Derek (Annie)
Keenan Wynn (Novak)
Keith Carradine (Ken)

In the days post-1975 C.E., nearly one third of the films released worldwide were copycats of Jaws. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly seems true. In fact, Jaws ranks as one of the most copied films of all time. Two years after the huge “Summer of the Shark,” Star Wars hit screens and ignited its own class of imitators as well. But with the bigger expense involved in making a Star Wars clone, Jaws still attracted the larger number of duplicates. (A close second is The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2, which low-budget filmmakers discovered was extremely easy and cheap to rip-off. A desert, junky cars, guys in leather fetish outfits and broken sports equipment. Ta-dah, you’ve got your own apocalyptic epic, on fifty-bucks a day.)

The most obvious of the Jaws clones to immediately follow in its wake is producer Dino De Laurentiis’s 1977 leap into the “killer beast on the loose” genre: Orca (helpfully titled Orca: Killer Whale or Orca: The Killer Whale on the poster and video covers for people unaware of what an ‘orca’ is and think it has something to do with the cannon-fodder creatures in The Lord of the Rings). De Laurentiis’s reputation as a producer had taken a big hit from his critical debacle of the 1976 remake of King Kong, a travesty which looks triply worse now that Peter Jackson has shown the right way to remake a classic. Because of the De Laurentiis name, the specter of Kong, and its status as an obvious rip-off, Orca doesn’t get much R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Even people who haven’t seen it often consider it a turkey.

Well, now I’ve seen it. And…it’s not that bad. Compared to Jaws it’s a leaky kiddie pool, but it makes for a decent ninety minutes of entertainment, especially for fan of 1970s genre cinema. The metaphor of nature’s revenge and the atmosphere of slow doom that creeps over the main character, Richard Harris’s misguided fisherman Captain Nolan, work surprisingly well. The story at its core sounds pretty ludicrous: an orca (a.k.a. a killer whale, but ‘orca’ is the accurate scientific term) pursues a quest of vengeance against the fisherman who accidentally killed its mate and unborn child, a vengeance that involves sabotaging an entire Newfondland town and tracking down the fisherman’s loved ones. True, orcas and dolphins have very evolved intelligences, but an orca that knows how to commit industrial sabotage against an oil refinery? Furthermore, it commits the sabotage because somehow it knows that this will force the townspeople to eject Nolan so that he will have to face the orca on the high seas. This isn’t a whale, it’s a supervillain!

A real orca in the wild

However, I found it easy to eventually dismiss the scientific nonsense of the plot and take it as a fantasy-fable, viewing the orca as more a mystic avenger or a symbol of the inevitability of death that haunts Nolan. The creature lurks offshore of the town, taunting Nolan with his eventual death and goading him to come out in the open and finally confront it. A lots of credit for the success goes to Richard Harris for his performance as Nolan. Harris was probably cast in imitation of Robert Shaw, another Irish actor, who made a lasting impression as the insane shark hunter Quint in Jaws. Thankfully, Harris doesn’t try to copy Shaw’s maniacal character, and plays Nolan instead as misguided and ultimately contrite for what he has done. In Jaws we don’t have to really like Robert Shaw’s character Quint because we have two other protagonists to balance out his madness. Since Nolan is the only protagonist in Orca, he has to generate some sympathy or the whole enterprise will just turn into a tired exercise in watching a jerk get his gory comeuppance. Many horror films have used this formula, and it rarely works. Orca sidesteps this problem.

But Orca falls down in some key areas. None of the supporting actors make much of an impression. Harris’s female co-star, Charlotte Rampling, hangs around to provide scientific data on orcas (some of which sounds suspect, like whale calls that contain more data than the Bible—I’m not sure how she figured that one out) and give Nolan a sounding board for his fears, but she has scant screen charisma aside from her slender British good looks. Bo Derek also appears as Nolan’s daughter, but the script forgets to integrate her into the story or give her a relationship with her father. She’s whale-bait from scene one. Will Sampson, a Native American actor who had roles in a few important films of the 1970s, like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Outlaw Josey Wales, shows up as the ‘native-who-knows-not-to-tamper-with-nature,’ but feels too much like an afterthought. Sampson may have appeared in some of my favorite films of all time, but he had a limited range as actor and feels particularly wooden and stiff here speaking the script’s silly ‘mystic’ lines.

A film of this type depends heavily on how well it can execute the title creature. Orca rates hit n’ miss in this department. Most of the footage of the whales was made from orcas in captivity and then selectively edited into the film to make it appear that the whales were interacting with the other footage. The photography looks good, but it is shot in tight close-ups and medium shots to hide that the orcas are inside man-made tanks, and sometimes the trickery appears obvious. For the attack scenes, or any time humans have to appear in the same shot as the orca, an animatronic whale or miniatures have to substitute, and they don’t quite make it. The fakery looks laughable in a scene where the orca smashes down Nolan’s stilt house on the harbor (if a super-intelligent killer whale is hunting you down, maybe you shouldn’t live on a waterfront house jutting over the bay!) and in the opening scene where an orca kills a great white shark (a petty swipe at Jaws, and a case of biting the hand that feeds you). Fortunately, a finale among ice floes manages to hide the special effects flaws well enough to make for an exciting conclusion of man going one-on-one with beast.

The movie recently made its debut on DVD, rescuing it from years of grainy pan & scan VHS copies. The DVD presents the movie in a widescreen anamorphic transfer of its Panavision process. The full aspect ratio image may cause a few viewers to reevaluate their opinion of the movie: some of the vistas of the orcas leaping through the ocean, or a pod of the animals attending to the ‘burial’ of the dead female, make for breathtaking viewing, especially when paired with Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score. Unfortunately, despite the crisp DVD image, the print has quite a bit of dust and scratching on it, mostly noticeable during night scenes, and could use some cleaning up. The sound is a dull mono 2.0. In the extras department, the disc is a definitive bare-bones offering, without even so much as a trailer. I have come to expect this from Paramount DVDs, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Orca has enough historical importance to at least warrant some screens of production notes. Director Michael Anderson is still alive, and I know he’s not too busy to do some commentary.

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