By Jacob Cameron

Killer Whale is an ocean survival horror film that joins the nearly endless amount of mediocre films in this subgenre. There is some attempt made to try and make this an effective horror film. But this ultimately fails. 

Killer Whale tells the story of two friends named Maddie and Trish played by Virginia Gardner and Mel Jarnson, respectively. The two go on vacation together after the former experiences tragedies, both physical and emotional. The two friends travel to a remote lagoon where a killer whale is rumored to be swimming. The two find the whale and the whale attacks them. Leaving them stranded on a rock in the middle of the lagoon.

The actual location of the movie looks very pretty. With a great deal of the tension coming from how empty and beautiful the location of the lagoon is. The film is similar to The Shallows in regards to how the environment is as much a character as the human characters. There is quite a bit of The Shallows DNA laces throughout the film. This is largely a bad thing.

The two main characters are paper thin in terms of character development. The only noteworthy pieces of backstory are done through rather large exposition dumps. There is even a twist regarding their friendship that feels incredibly unearned. Especially since it is directly tied to a scene earlier in the film that was not directly referenced for over an hour into the film after the scene happens. This was a lazy twist that was meant to be crushing, but it was the opposite effect.

Additionally, the visual effects are largely mediocre. When it comes to making a movie involving a killer whale, a certain amount of CGI is necessary to achieve the desired effect. Even though there are some good-looking shots and locations, there are some painfully obvious looking CGI sunsets. The actual whale looks very bad as well. It is an exaggeration to say it’s the worst. There are plenty of bad ocean horror movies out there, but this was inexcusably bad. There were also scenes where it appears that the actors were not rendered properly in post production so that they blended in with the green screen properly.

As mentioned, there is a twist that just feels tacked on with no purpose. This can be applied to several different plot elements in the movie. For example, the main character must wear hearing aids after an event near the start of the film. This leads to a dumb moment where she must get her hearing aid batteries before swimming from the killer whale that wants to eat her.

At the end of the day, this is a film that is, at best, painfully generic. There are, unfortunately, a lot of very bad nautical horror movies. Giant sharks, piranhas, and more nautical creatures bring made the villains of mediocre horror films. Killer Whale is, sadly, another one of the mediocre ones.

1 star