Orca

Orca

orca still

Ennio Morricone passed away last year, leaving behind music scored for more than 400 films and television – which made him the most prolific composer of all time. His score for Once Upon A Time In The West is one of the best-selling film scores of all time, at an estimated 10 million copies sold.

Needless to say, we had a lot to choose from for our tribute episode to this legendary contributor to cinema history, and indeed we have already covered several films he has scored, such as The Thing, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, and Exorcist 2: The Heretic. We chose the Jaws knock-off “Orca” because…well, it’s a movie we’d always wanted to check out. And boy, were we pleasantly surprised.

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Orca (1977)

2 Guys and a Chainsaw, Episode 245

Todd: hello and welcome to another episode of two guys in the chainsaw. I’m Todd. And I’m Craig, once again, this week, we continue our series of tributes to people who we lost last year in 2021 person. I think about midway through the year. Last year may not be known to too many people, but you’ve definitely heard his music.

Ennio Morricone and he was a pretty famous and extremely prolific composer of film scores, especially during the sixties and seventies. Uh, well into the eighties, starting out, of course, in Italian cinema and crossing over into a ton, a ton of productions. And so, uh, yeah, we lost him last year and we have done some films, uh, on this podcast that he has scored and he did in fact score a couple geology picks that, uh, I would love to get to, but knowing that, uh, Craig would probably send a glove to kill her to my house, to murder me.

If I made him go through another jello pick. Eventually so soon after we did Tena Bray a couple of weeks ago, uh, I decided, uh, to pick one that both he and I were very interested in seeing, and this is 1970 sevens Orca, the killer whale, basically a jaws knockoff produced by Dino de Laurentiis, who specialized in this sort of thing.

The, I guess the story that I read was that a dealer entas called Luciano. Vincent. Zoney a writer that he collaborated with or worked with quite a, quite a lot in the middle of the night and was like, Hey, we need to do some kind of jaws thing. And the guy had admitted that he had seen jaws and started to research killer whales and found that there’s a lot of subject matter.

There there’s a lot you can play with on the killer whale angle. Maybe even argue that they’re a little more dangerous than great white sharks are. And so they took that and ran with it and came up with what I think. Ends up being I’m more Moby Dick than jaws. Yeah. It has its moments. I was really excited to see this movie just because it’s the film that I grew up hearing a lot about, you know, we just kinda knew it was there.

Maybe it showed up on TV every once in awhile knew about it as this jaws knockoff, I always intended to see and never got to see until now. So, uh, here we are, we’re able to talk about the movie, talk about the score behind it and tribute to Ennio Morricone. How about you, Craig? Had you seen it? No,

Craig: I hadn’t.

Uh, like you said, just like you, I had been aware of it and had thought that it was, you know, kind of a jaws, not. Off whatever killer whale, terrorizing people in this small community. When we were talking about, you know, doing this tribute, you did throw out a couple of things and to be fair to me, I said, we can do whatever you want.

If you want to do another giallo a week. Yeah. I’ve

Todd: been married long enough to know sometimes when people say something

you might want to think twice about, uh, following them down

Craig: now. No, it’s fine. You very graciously said. And I just said, I’ve always been interested in seeing this just because I knew it existed. And I don’t know. I it’s not as though I necessarily. Heard a lot about it. I just knew that it was out there and I just expected that being a jaws knockoff, that it was going to be bad.

And that’s what I said to you. I’m like, dude, pick what you want. Orca is going to be bad. I want to see it eventually, but it’s going to be bad. And then I watched it. And I didn’t think it was that bad. I

Todd: thought it was perfectly fine. I mean, to be honest, you’re absolutely right. It’s probably better than a lot of the sequels to jaws ended up being.

Craig: It is. And really in terms of. A lot of things, really, there were things that I really liked about it. Like there’s a lot of real life whale footage and underwater photography, and it looks really good. And even the fake whales that they use looks shockingly real. Like I read that, uh, they used a couple of big fake.

Rubber, I guess whales. But when they were transporting one of them, they got stopped by animal advocacy groups who thought that they were actually transporting real live animals. That’s how realistic they looked. And they used footage, um, of real whales from like, uh, uh, SeaWorld type place. It wasn’t SeaWorld, but a place like that.

And obviously you can tell that some of the footage, like with the whales jumping out of the water and stuff, you can tell that it’s super imposed over other settings. But for the most part, the whales look surprisingly real. They did have to do a lot of edit cuts for like attack sequences and stuff. And those don’t look so convincing, but yeah.

Other than that, it looks pretty good. And I was surprisingly moved in parts of this. Like there were parts that kind of upset me visually. And, uh, I don’t know. I was just, I was very surprised. I don’t think it’s a great movie. It’s not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but I was really pleasantly surprised.

I went into it, expecting it to be really bad and it really wasn’t.

Todd: I completely agree with you. And you know, you have some very competent people working on this movie. You’re the director, Michael Anderson is kind of a classic director from the fifties. And, uh, he did Logan’s run the year before this, which is a movie I’ve always enjoyed.

The writer has written a ton of stuff for a few dollars, more the sequel to a fistful of dollars, and then the good, the bad and the ugly. Even up into the eighties, he wrote raw deal, which was a Schwartzenegger action pick. And then of course, you know, it’s a Dino de Laurentiis production. So the production value is pretty good.

It’s, you know, it’s, it’s sort of lower high budget. Good. Right. There’s there’s some stuff it’s kind of fake, but then there’s some surprisingly good scenes and things where you think, okay. Yeah, they clearly spent a bit of money on this one. And then the act heirs, uh, Richard Harris is the star. And, you know, he is just a veteran of even by this point stage and screen and up until he played the Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies.

Oh my gosh. That’s

Craig: so funny. I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from and I totally forgotten that he was in

Todd: that. Yeah. Um, great, uh, Irish actor and then, uh, this happens to be Bo Derek’s a screen debut. It’s not the first movie she played in, but the first movie that she played and didn’t get released until after this movie was released.

So, uh, this was her first appearance on the screen and she has a bit part, but she’s, she looks pretty. She looks very pretty. Yeah, it’s really nice. She doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does look pretty. Even Robert Carradine has a small part in here who plays, uh, a guy named Ken. And, uh, I was like, Oh yeah, of course.

He’s one of the carotenes right. I think he’s John Carradine son. Those of us again from the eighties will remember him. He’s the main guy. He’s the main nerd and revenge of the nerds. The dude with a goofy. Oh yeah. Yeah. Gosh, that’s so funny. I had no idea. Yeah. You know, he’s got a blink, almost a blanket if you’d, and you’d miss it roll.

It’s like he’s in the beginning and then you never see him for awhile. And then towards the end he pops in and I was like, who’s that guy? Oh, that’s right. That’s the beginning of the movie,

Craig: he looks very different than he looks in revenge of the nerds. Like he’s so nerdy in that movie, he looks totally different.

I would have never recognized him.

Todd: Yeah. So, I mean, you know, there’s some great stars in this films. Very good stars. And then of course the score Ennio Morricone and it’s a lovely score. I think

Craig: really is. I have to say like the, the movie opens up with just this, uh, with whale song. First of all over the initial opening credits.

And then it’s just a lot of shots of orcas jumping out of the water. You know, ever since the release of Blackfish, I’ve been very, very torn about these. Marine attractions like SeaWorld and stuff. But when I was a kid, my parents took me to sea world. Well, actually we went to Orlando, Florida, and we went to like all of the amusement parks, Disney, universal MGM.

You know, all of these parks, but our favorite by far was SeaWorld. We just absolutely loved it. And we saw the Orca shows and they were amazing to see these enormous. Creatures that could just perform, literally perform these incredible feats, you know, jumping out of the water. And of course this was in the eighties when the, um, trainers were still allowed to swim and perform with them.

So jumping out of the water with a trainer balanced on their nose and, you know, diving off. You know, when they’re at the peak of their jump. And sometimes if you were lucky you would, they would do like meet and greets with the whales and you would get to pet them and stuff. And I think that I got to do that.

I don’t remember. I was a little, little kid, so I don’t remember if I got to like, sit on a dolphin or pet one of the whales or what, but it was just such a. Uh, an amazing experience. And now knowing what I know about the conditions that those animals are kept in, and it’s really quite sad, you know, but yeah, I got, I’m still torn about it because it’s such, it’s one of my fondest childhood memories.

But, uh, anyway, you get all this great footage of them jumping and swimming, underwater scored by this orchestral score. That’s very beautiful and really highlights the beauty of the natural setting and these majestic creatures even had we not been. Thinking about the score, because this was attribute, I would have noticed it because it’s very fitting and it really does the lot to set the mood, not only in the beginning, but in later, like heart-wrenching parts of the movie too,

Todd: I found was great in the very, very beginning.

I mean, one of the first things we see before we would see too much of the whales is, uh, just an oscilloscope, you know, and we hear the sounds of the whales talking to each other as they’re recorded. And there’s a very minimalistic. Kind of score underneath this, that gradually builds to the orchestral score, but I thought it was really neat what he did there, where he used trumpets and the trumpet sound like the whales.

It was a really cool, like a mimicking of the whale sounds with the trumpets. And we don’t hear that again, really, I think in the rest of the movie, but it was a really interesting way to bring the music into that. You know, the film very, very slowly and very gradually. Visual does, we’ve got this bear Sol scope on the screen and then slowly but surely we start to see all this beautiful, wonderful underwater footage and above water.

What is, which I might add? We’re going to see a lot more of it. Yeah. Later here’s one particular shot. And when you watch it, you almost, you have to laugh, especially at the beginning because it’s one of those too good to be true shots where there’s like a sun setting, but it’s kind of dark outside and there.

Two whales at the same time, leap up into the air and arch backwards and go back up, which you can tell is the same shot. It’s just been reversed. Yeah. Like do whales. And you could tell it sort of superimposed over the scene. That was probably shot at like, you know, Marine world or wherever. And then that very same shot gets super imposed, like five more times truly.

In the rest of the movie, but it’s fine because it’s the seventh, it’s the late seventies, it’s the best they could do with what they had. And I thought it was acceptable because there’s so much footage.

Craig: It’s not CGI, frankly. I would rather see that than CGI.

Todd: Exactly. So somebody is recording these sounds, and then we see the beach and there’s a recorder, nice little reel to reel recorder, following a line down into the water.

And then there’s a scuba diver under the water. Who’s going down to either adjust the equipment or maybe retrieve the microphone and a is frightened by a shark. And this shark starts a threatening this diver, and he’s trying to hide from the shark and you think the sharks going to kind of get him and then a boat comes in and sort of scares the shark away.

And the boat is the, the Bumbo. And uh, here on the bumper is our main character. Nolan. Nolan is the grizzled Seafarer dashing in the movie, in his mid forties or whatever, who is out there hunting for each. Is he hunting sharks at this point? Or is he actually legit

Craig: hunting? No, he’s hunting that it’s a great white shark and he’s hunting it, but not to kill it.

He wants to capture it because Marine world or. You know, whatever one of those places, gosh, the best word I can come up with is, has put a bounty out. They, they, they want to capture alive specimen. Uh, and so that’s what, um, he’s trying to do, but he’s interrupted by Ken who’s in a small boat, like a buoy with a motor who comes up and says you can’t shoot at it.

Or, I don’t know if there’s a diver down. Right. Um, and the diver comes up and you kept referring him. Yeah. It’s, it’s a chick. Her name is Rachel and, and she is a scientist. I think, you know, she’s studying the whales. It’s, it’s kind of a weird scene. Like Ken takes her, he pulls her into his little buoy and then he takes her over to the fishing boat and she boards the fishing boat and then he goes, I guess he’s going back to shore.

I don’t know, but something happens and he falls out of the boat.

Todd: Like the way I would fall out of a boat, it just looks super clumsy, but he falls into the water and of course there’s that shark and now it’s dangerous, right? The sharks coming at him and then suddenly out of the blue, this killer whale comes in and takes out the shark.

And I thought this was so great. This is this movie’s like middle finger to jaws. Like, Oh, you think jaws is scary, you know, we’re about to talk. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. It’s and it’s funny. Cause like the, you see the killer whale approaching very quickly and then like it knocks the shark and like shoots it like 40 feet into the air.

Todd: You know, the killer whales in this movie do nothing better than pushing stuff around. Really. They are really good at bumping up against things and pushing them around.

So it’s great,

Craig: but it kills it. And so everybody’s. Fine. And then we cut, like Rachel’s like giving a seminar or something and she’s talking about killer whales and she has a whole monologue, but she talks about how they’re the most powerful animal in the world. But she also makes a point of saying that they have a profound.

Instinct for vengeance

Todd: a couple times, right? Like, Ooh, is this for shadowing or something? I don’t know. Yep. The most amazing

Craig: thing about these creatures is neither their gentleness nor their violence, but their brains slides via scan.

Todd: She shows us picture of this brain of an, or of an Orca as compared to a humans.

And it’s at least as big and. Uh, maybe he’s even got a lot more folds in it, which would indicate pretty, pretty high intelligence, like Moby Dick. You’re going to learn a lot about killer whales in this movie in a very short amount of time. Actually the producer and director and of black fish referenced Orca several times, I guess, in that movie, I don’t remember.

I did see black. It was quite a while ago, but I got in this dialogue there on the, in this article where they were talking about, you know, the misconceptions and the, kind of the balance that you kind of have to have when you approach this, because they’re not called killer whales because they run around and kill things.

It’s because they kill whales. Orca is we’ll actually take down whales bigger than themselves. Sometimes called the wolves of the sea, but also they’re very closely related to dolphins. We all know dolphins are super intelligent. And so there are these lovable aspects of them as well. They are playful.

They do have these sort of family groups. One thing that the movie also emphasize as, as, as we, as we get in, which becomes very, very important is that, um, they will find a mate. For life. Yeah. But that’s not true. It’s not true. Yeah. It’s like the, the, the, actually the males are just like, uh, they basically kind of like dolphins, like they just bang everybody and everything.

And usually not even with their consent. Well, I,

Craig: I, I was actually really fascinated. I was fascinated by this because they made such a point of saying that they’re monogamous and they stay with their same partner and with their families, their whole life. And that’s not true, but I mean, it’s kind of based in reality because they do.

Stay in their own pods, but male orcas stay in their mother’s pod. And then female orcas go outside of their pods to mate, we suppose to avoid inbreeding. But they, I guess science thought that, uh, orcas were monogamous because they stayed with the same women all their life. But. Those are their mothers and sisters that they don’t mate with and, and other females come in and meet with them and then go back to their own pods.

But for the purpose of the movie, it works well and it’s believable. And the whole setup is that this Nolan guy, when he realizes that he’s not going to get his shark and he sees. You know how vicious these killer whales can be. He’s like, Oh, well, okay. Instead I’ll capture a killer whale. They go out looking for them and find them immediately.

But again, it’s this beautiful footage of this pot of whales swimming together. And it is, it’s really majestic to see these huge groups of these normous animals swimming together, you know, surfacing in unity. And, and this is all real footage and it looks really cool. And for the purpose of the movie, because they look so majestic and because we’ve been fed this line about how they stay together, even though it’s a little bit off factually, you know, I felt sentimental about them.

Like, like I didn’t want, I didn’t want this guy to go out and. Hurt, any one of them that even one of his lady, crew members, I think it’s Bo Derek says, you know, they mate for life and he’s like, Oh no, really? I didn’t know that. And she’s like, so if we take one, we could be breaking up a family and he’s just like, Hm, you know, that’s a real head scratcher or

Todd: whatever, but go ahead and load up the syringe.

Yeah.

Craig: Load up the syringe. Uh, and they find the pod and he just kind of very recklessly captain Ahab style, crawls up on the perch and points his harpoon and shoots any grazes, a male. And that it’s an important plot point. Like he takes a chunk out of it’s fin convenient for us. Yeah. Convenient for us.

But the harpoon ends up hitting a female. And I swear, like, I don’t know if you felt the same way, but this almost made me sick, like physically sick. Yeah. It was very brutal. And because I don’t know if this is realistic or not. I do know that whales do vocalize, but in this moment, like this, this whale is screaming.

It upsets, even him even normal. It is like, yeah. And, uh, it’s screaming and it’s thrashing and it gets all tangled up in the rope and the male is looking on and they drag this female in. Well, she

Todd: also. Is like coming up against, uh, the propeller of the boat.

Craig: Yeah. It like, they, they say she’s trying to kill

Todd: herself.

Yeah. I’m not sure about that. That was kind of weird, but yeah, he pulls him up. It pulls her up out of the water. And this is so interesting, the way that this was filmed, where they have this whale up by the tail, you know, hanging and as they’re dragging it over and across. Oh, hanging over the boat. She’s still alive.

She’s a, you know, got in her mouth is moving. And like you said, it’s a pretty realistic and it’s not thrashing around, but it probably wouldn’t be, but it’s just enough, you know, to be realistic enough. And you’re like, Oh God, and there’s blood there and everything. And the mail. Whale, his head is like above water.

Like he’s watching what’s going on and also kind of screaming. And I mean, almost to the point where it was a little cheesy.

Craig: Yes, it definitely was, but it still got me. I mean, you know that I’m an animal lover and just to see an animal in pain and clearly in fear. And I know it’s fake. I know it’s a movie.

But it just kinda, it was a gut punch and then it’s hanging there bleeding, and this part is probably super unrealistic. Um, but it expels it expels an unborn. Fetus, and this is fake. Like it’s totally fake, but it looks real. Like they really did a good job with these effects. Cause it looks real and it expels this fetus.

And when Rachel had been doing her lecture, she had shown pictures. Of a four month old whale fetus. And she had made note of how much it looks like a human fetus. And I have no idea if that’s true, but the picture that she showed it did very much look like a human fetus. And so when the whale expels, it, it doesn’t look like a person, but.

It will, it has some kind of human characteristics and it clearly freaks Nolan out and he’s like, yeah, get it off the boat, get it off, uses a hose to spray it off the boat. But at the same time, God, this is traumatic.

Todd: It is traumatic. And there’s these close-ups on the whales, I, which is another thing we’re going to get a lot more of.

Um, like it’s looking at him and I know at one point, no, one’s face a superimposed in the eye. Like I see you you’ve arrived working, but once again, like you mentioned, the thing that really got me about this scene is this, all of this really disturbs Nolan, like. Clearly, every bit of it has been disturbing him from the moment he harpooned that thing and it started screaming to, they brought it up on board to the reaction of, of the male.

And then this is, which just is like the cherry on top, just flops out unceremoniously, which again, it was kind of silly, but it was just this entire disaster. This guy who’s. Presumably his career is he’s out there. He’s a fishermen, you know, I mean, he’s not experienced with whales obviously, but he’s clearly an experienced guy at harpooning.

Other things. The worst possible thing is happening right in front of him. And it bothers the heck out of him. And I think that did a lot to instantly get on his side in this, it, it did a lot to instantly make him a sympathetic character. I think in this movie, which was essential, really. I think for it going on, like, I didn’t want him to be callous, but he had to be bullied into doing what he needed to do.

It takes some convincing, but it’s not because he didn’t, doesn’t give a crap about animals or at least in this particular circumstance.

Craig: Well, that, that surprised me about the movie because I did expect him to just be this callous guy and I expected like. You know, if there was going to be, you know, this whale that was out for vengeance against him or whatever, that he was just going to be the captain Ahab type that was, you know, hard ass, right.

Me

Todd: against you, we’re going to catch a kind of thing. And

Craig: it, it surprised me and that it’s not that at all, like he’s immediately regretful. Like I already had a preconceived notion of him just from his kind of cocky attitude from the beginning, but then it. Shifts and he’s, he’s clearly remorseful for what he’s done.

He doesn’t really understand the gravity of a at first, but he talks to Rachel about it. And she explains, you know, these deep connections that these whales have and he kind of feels bad. And then they, so the whale is hanging there and then it’s nighttime. And then the male whale starts battering the boat.

And so no one says, is the female still alive? And somebody says, I can’t imagine how, but yes she is. And he’s like drop her back in, you know, get her off the boat. And so they do, but right. As soon as they do the, the boat is already kind of tipped because of the weight of the whale and the barrage of the beatings from the mail.

One of the crew people is hanging from like one of those lookout posts or

Todd: something. I don’t know where it’s like the mast. Yeah. Where he cut her down from, it’s like a horizontal mass. Yeah.

Craig: And the male jumps up and grabs him and kills him. Uh, and. Fine. Not eat some, but grabs him and he’s dead. Yeah.

Todd: Bites them right off the side and T you know, takes them down. Oh. And, and I think this is the point actually where the male surfaces again, and looks at Nolan and no one’s face is in his eye. And Nolan looks at the whale and he kind of realizes, Oh my God, you know, it’s goofy.

Craig: But for this type of movie, it worked like every day.

Todd: Cause the next scene, the next scene is long. And it’s basically sinus coming up and this whale is pushing the female along. And the music here is almost like a funeral

Craig: dirge

Todd: Oh my God. And it, and it, this is so long and so dramatic and actually so well filmed, I thought, I thought it was never.

Craig: Sad. It felt like a funeral because the male is pushing the female, but the rest of the pod is with him. It felt like a few. Now I have no idea of anything. No, that’s a lie. I was going to say, I have no idea.

If anything like this really happens, it does whales do mourn their dead. There was a recorded instance of a mother whale who had given birth. And I don’t remember if the. If the calf was still born or if it died soon after birth, but she pushed it for, I think. Hundreds of miles on the migration. Um, and scientists had no idea why she would do that.

And they just eventually came to the conclusion that she was mourning and like, Oh, it’s deep. And you know, as I eat my cheeseburgers every day, I try not to think about. Animals having those kind of feelings, but clearly some of them do and, uh, the way that they treat it with the cinematography and the score it’s emotionally impactful.

I was moved.

Todd: Yeah. I mean, your cheeseburger had a mom. I know,

Craig: but what I, what I was getting to about Nolan, uh, feeling guilty, he talks to Rachel and she explained some of these things to him, but then he goes to the crew member’s funeral and he talks to a priest. What I was meaning to ask you, like, can you commit a sin against an animal? You can commit a sin against a blade of grass.

Sins are really against oneself. From that point on, he understands kind of the weight of what he has done. Plus he’s reminded because the whales coming to get him.

Todd: Exactly. Well, they, he ends up here on the shore where the whale had basically beached, uh, the female. And so they’re in this kind of fishing town and he’s docked there and you meet the doctor and he meets the priest, but he also meets a guy named Jacob who’s.

Probably a native of the area or something. Maybe that’s the idea anyway, but he’s will Samson who I know. Yeah. From Poltergeist two and a one flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, I was just instantly recognizable and I thought, Oh yeah, this is this guy. Who’s in all these movies. And I went to IMD B and I’m like, no, he has actually not been in a lot of movies.

He’s just been in like, Three or four high profile films. Huh?

Craig: Yeah. I recognized him right away. Uh he’s he’s chief Brompton and one flew over the Cuckoo’s nest. I mean, that’s, that’s an amazing movie and amazing role. And I really enjoyed him in Poltergeist too. Yeah, me too. He doesn’t have a whole lot to do here, except for that.

He can tell Nolan some of the natives. Mythology about, uh, these killer whales

Todd: and I’ll be happy memories and more about how they have vengeance and all that

Craig: stuff. And he tells them if I were you, I would stay far from this territory. But, uh, he doesn’t and, and the Harbor master comes and talks to him too.

I assume it’s the Harbor master his name’s Al Swain. He says he’s in charge around these parts or whatever, the local

Todd: fisherman’s union.

Craig: Yeah. And he warns him. Like, it’s interesting how he approached him because he’s not outwardly threatening, but. His meaning is very clear and he warns him that some people around here think that Orca is in the area will drive away their fish, which is their livelihood.

Basically what he’s telling him is get the hell out of here. You know, like you brought this scourge on us. Get it out of here. And immediately after that, we see that the Orca is in the Harbor and it comes up and just destroys all of the fishing boats except. Except for Nolan’s.

Todd: Yeah, crazy. Right. It punches holes in the bottom of a ball.

It’s crazy. The scene. Once again, they’re not coming, going after him, like with pitchforks and trying to get him out of there. It’s like just strongly suggested that he leave. And a little bit later on the Al guy says to him, we decided we’re going to fix up your boat first. Uh, so that you can, uh, take off, he ends up kind of drunk and he’s, you know, he’s kind of trying to figure out what to do because they’re burying the whale.

I guess they want him to leave. In the meantime, he has a discussion with, with her and then the guy says, Hey, the whale was spotted up by the North. Point Rachel, you know, says, don’t go to North point. Don’t go up there while he goes up there to

Craig: after he was like, uh, no, I totally won’t the very next CD’s there.

This scene of any of them I thought was kind of silly, but I still didn’t hate it. Like. Dark. And there’s just a red light on the end of the dock. And like, he, he looks out and he doesn’t see anything. So he turns around and then he hears a splash. So he turns back and that happens. Like

Todd: it goes a

Craig: long while and then he turns back and he finally sees it. And it’s. Surfaces and it screams at him. Like it gives

Todd: him the stink eye again

Craig: and just, you know, the orcas head sticking up out of the dark water illuminated by this red light screaming at him. And I think again, you kind of see Nolan’s.

Reflection in his eyes. It’s, it’s heavy handed, but I don’t know. It didn’t bother me. I was into this movie

Todd: and there’s a quick cut of a car going off the road. That’s just pops in and pops out. And then we’re in the next scene where he wakes up the next morning and I was like, car went off. What was this about the car going off the road?

And then I realized, Oh, it must be some. Vision or some flashback or something we’re going to get, it’s going to be explained later, he wakes up in the home in which he is staying in, which is a house that’s completely up on stilts over the outside edge of the shore. And the minute I swear to you, the minute I saw him, because this is the thing that I’m always thinking about in these jaws.

Killer whale movies is like, you know, if you don’t go on the water, you’re absolutely

Craig: fine out of the water. You dumb ass,

Todd: you know? So the minute I saw that they were in this house on stilts, over the sea, I was like, Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I see where this is going to go. I’m sure that somehow the whale’s gonna attack this house and I wasn’t disappointed, but first he comes out of the house and stands out there and Jacob tells him he really should go hunt the whale because everyone’s super pissed at

Craig: him.

There’s a really funny story about like Will’s voodoo doll. Yeah. They have this shaman. So a small skin whale, and Stephanie with deliverers of birds, they make this water on it and throw it into the sea. With some words, if all has been done, right. The monster spirit flies out. Let me smell and he was dead.

I was hoping for that scene, but they don’t do that.

Well, then there’s a silly scene where Nolan like sets up a dummy of himself at the end of the pier. And it says, though, he’s going to shoot it. But Rachel shows up and says, Oh no, you can’t do this. The whale wants to, he’s not going to show up because he wants to fight.

Todd: That he’s going to go look the way on the, I apologize.

You said they were intelligent. I I’m just going to wait until these services. I’m going to look him in the eye and apologize. No, Pete steps. My apologies.

Craig: Oh gosh, that was so like, he was going to shoot it, but then he realized he didn’t want to sit. He just wanted to talk to it. Like some point later in the movie. It’s implied that he could like understand the whale now, like she asks him like, what is he thinking? And he’s like, he’s thinking this, like he can understand, but it’s really funny.

But it turns out that he wants to apologize because he says the same thing happens to me. He understands why the whale is so angry because the same thing happened to him. His wife. Was pregnant. I was pregnant. Yeah. And on her way to the hospital, I guess, to give birth, she was killed by a drunk driver. So it explains why he was so upset by that whole fetus episode, but how convenient, right?

Oh gosh, super convenient. But he does. I mean, he’s. He legitimately feels bad. Okay. And then the Orca blows up the whole town.

Todd: He knows, he just knows how everything works. You just services out of the water and knock some gas pipes away, which, you know, run around, I guess, to some buildings. And then he bangs the bottom of another building. A lantern fall down and light it up. But not only does it just, actually, this was a cool scene, right?

Because it’s all practical. It just flames are just going all across the entire Bay and everything. That’s there right up the mountain to where there’s like oil refinery or something. Right. Thing, completely explodes.

Craig: And the whale just revels in it. Like it’s out off the coast, like jumping out of the water, like it’s so happy.

Todd: Arching through the air kind of thing that we saw earlier. Super

Craig: he’s really proud of himself. Like he blew up the whole tap. Oh

Todd: man.

Craig: So the Harbor asked guy or the lead fishermen or whatever shows up or no, he calls him in a very ominous call and says your boat will be done in the morning. You and your crew need to get out of here.

And if you don’t, there’s going to be trouble, basically. So Nolan tells the crew to get out of town. And one of them, the guy goes off to like fuel up the car or something. I don’t know. And Nolan called me Rachel and tells him that he’s going to go after the whale. And then she somehow talks him out of it.

Like it’s a whole psychology thing. Like. I didn’t even get it. Like, I kind of lost her train of thought, like he’s just dangerous and angry. And like, who do you owe more to the whale? Are these towns people? And he’s like, Oh, I guess the whale, like what I like, you know,

Todd: Yeah, it was weird. It was so weird because it, you know, early and he even says this, you know, earlier you were trying to tell me that, you know, I need to go out and, you know, make events with it and whatever.

And she’s like, well earlier I just told you that because I didn’t think you were remorseful enough. Yeah, but I didn’t really mean it now that I see you’re remorseful, I’m telling you, you shouldn’t go. It was, it was dumb, but you know, she’s going to be along for the ride. And then Jacob just kind of offhandedly offers that he can, he can help too.

He tells the, uh, who’s this guy, we haven’t even mentioned this

Craig: guy, Ken it’s, um, Paul.

Todd: Played by Peter Hooton. Yeah. Paul, the male crew member. Who’s kind of banging in bodark Nick’s character the whole time. He runs into Jacob at the gas thing and Jacob’s like, look, you’ve got to tell him he’s got to get out of town and I’ll even go with you guys to help out

Craig: well, but the townspeople aren’t going to just let them leave.

Like they’re, they’re forcing them to leave. On the boat because they want them to take the whale with them. Right. Paul is trying to gas up the car so that he can take Bo Derek

Todd: and

Craig: take it out there, but they’re not going to let them go. And Jacob says he has to fight it, but I’ll help if you want. And then the whale attacks.

The house, which I assumed that he would. And I was surprised that he hadn’t already, he knocks out the supports underneath. I don’t remember the girl’s name is Annie Bo. Derek is Annie. And, um, she had been injured before when the whale, it like hit the boat. She had broken her ankle or something. So she’s in a cast.

So the house is. Tilted because the supports have been knocked out. So it’s tilted down towards the ocean and she is sliding down and they try to rescue her, but the whale jumps up and bites her leg and then celebrates

Todd: again.

Craig: And, and then Nolan very dramatically said

Todd: Oh, it’s so dramatic, but it’s cool. It’s cool. Dramatic. I mean, it’s exactly what you expected. There were two things here, first of all. Once again, like the production value of this movie was pretty high to have this very elaborate. Um, and I think, well filmed and very tense scene of them. I knew she was going to get it.

I actually, I thought the whale was just going to Chomper. This movie has no qualms killing people off. And that was, you know, that was refreshing.

Craig: And I thought she was dead because the attack scenes are very brief. They’re super, super quick because they have to do interesting things with. Cutting because obviously, you know, they’re not filming real wheels, attacking people.

So they’re very quick cuts. I saw that it got. That it chomped her. And I just assumed that she was dead, but he says later Nolan says later, like three people dead and one poor girl named for the rest of her life or whatever. So she’s

Todd: not dead. The other thing, you know, speaking to the score is there’s an interesting choice being made here.

You know, the jaws score is pretty iconic because it really builds this tension. Every time jaws is coming, there’s that dah, dah, dah dah data. And you’d think that a movie that’s kind of ripping off jaws would really try it out. Up that overdramatized, especially because this score does go into this sort of dramatic territory in these quiet and nice scenes.

But here, when the, when the whale is coming, all we hear are whale sounds and this kind of minimalist, um, It’s like a screeching or scratching over, I don’t know, steel drums or

Craig: something.

Todd: why is it the piano? I’m not sure exactly what it is and it’s repeated multiple times through the movie, but, um, I think it was a good choice. I mean, at least. It made the movie stand out a little bit, made it a little different from jaws. I don’t know. I think one could argue that maybe there’s not as much suspense in this movie that maybe it’s not as suspenseful as it could be.

Craig: I don’t know. I think, I think it’s fair that it may not be that suspenseful, but. It’s it’s fast paced. Like it, it’s never boring for sure. It moves, you know, me and my attention span, as we’ve said a million times for me, the biggest sin of a movie, any movie, but especially a horror movie is if it’s boring and this movie is not boring, it moves and moves.

I mean the next, so then the next day they leave. And the orcas shows up and there’s some stupid dynamite accident that I don’t even understand. Like, I didn’t understand that either like Nolan, Nolan, he, they, they find the whale or the whale finds them or whatever. And then he’s going to throw some dynamite in the water.

No, I don’t. I don’t know if. That was to disable the whale. I mean, I know that unethical people fish that way, you know, because the shockwaves stun or killed the fish, but Rachel, like, won’t let him, so she’s like fighting him and she knocks the dynamite back onto the boat and then she has to run and it ends up in the water anyway, and nothing comes of it.

So, yeah. It’s just kind of stupid. I don’t know. But then I loved this part. Like the whale. I couldn’t figure out what it was doing. Like it taunts them, like it’s, it’s putting it in. Tail fin up above the water and like waving at them. And then it puts its, you know, side fin up and is like waving at them.

But apparently no one can understand it now. And it knows that it’s telling them just to follow them to follow it.

Todd: It’s so hilarious. It’s it’s cartoonish, right?

Craig: It is it’s silly, but whatever I was totally down and then I don’t know, Ken is like, In the lifeboat, for some reason that I didn’t understand, and the whale jumps up and eats hand.

And so I keep saying, eat it does it just comes to them. And then the, the whale, like Rachel and Nolan are in the. Underbelly or whatever you call it of the boat and they can hear the whale song. And like I said before, it’s just like, what is it thinking? And he’s like, he’s saying, you’re my drunk driver.

Yeah. Like, he totally understands why it’s mad at him. Yeah.

Todd: The notion, the whole thing here is that he’s kind of also getting obsessive and crazy, you know, it’s, it’s the most dickish kind of thing. And then the other crew members kind of play this up too. Like Paul talks to Rachel and says, you’re getting to be as crazy as Nolan once again, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

And then he kind of puts together. He says, no one says, Oh, it’s leading us up North. I mean they’re, they must be going on for days just following this whale. And even after it’s killed one of their crew members and Paul mentions, you know, Hey, do you know if no one radioed in that, that Ken was killed because surely they would have, you know, required us to turn back and just store.

And we haven’t yet, but he somehow puts together, Oh, the whales leading us up North to where their ice flows to take us into this waters where it’s going to damage our ship. But then he also says, Ah, but he’s not as smart as I thought he was, because if he goes there and he’s going to be underneath the ice, he won’t be able to surface and to breathe.

Craig: Okay. But they keep following him and like, it is silly. It doesn’t make any sense. And I really don’t know where they started out, but they very quickly get into Arctic waters with icebergs everywhere. And as silly as that may be, it looks fantastic. And I was, I was. You know, it was a great place for the final act of, of this piece.

And it looks, uh, it looks treacherous. Jacob talks about Jacobs with them, by the way, he talks about how they’re, they don’t have enough fuel to get back. And Nolan’s like, well, once it’s all done, you guys can call for a helicopter or whatever. Rachel’s like, what do you mean you guys can call back? And he just looks on I’m honestly, like he knows he’s not.

You’re going to survive this or whatever. Right. And so there’s. Tons of, uh, icebergs and stuff. And Nolan tells he doesn’t tell a story, but he just says that in his attempt to capture the shark and in his attempt to capture the whale, all he wanted to do was raised enough money to go back home because he realized that the sea life.

It wasn’t for him or whatever. And he says, tomorrow will be the day, you know, prophetically. And then he says like, obviously the whale loved his family more than I loved mine. Okay.

Todd: I can write this off a little bit. And just by saying, he’s just going a little crazy, right? So his stupidity of it is maybe just Nolan going crazy and being stupid. I’ll, I’ll be generous enough to the writer to, to say that they get into some issue right there going through the ice flows or whatever they’re re ramming into things.

And Paul decides he’s going to split. I guess he starts, he goes up to one of the hanging lifeboats and he starts tossing things onto it. Isn’t

Craig: that? Didn’t I already say that. Didn’t I say he got

Todd: eaten. Sure. I thought you were talking about Ken. Ken got eaten the first time, right? Who gets eaten first?

Paul or Ken? I can’t remember. They both get eat about the same way they’re in some lights that then. The Orca comes up and eats them

Craig: on this particular outing. Only whichever one of them is not already eaten. It gets eaten well. And I don’t know if it’s Paul or Ken, but I was reading, you know, like in the trivia or whatever, that it’s ironic, that can get killed by the whale because the whale had rescued him from the shark.

Oh yeah. You’re in the movie.

Todd: The whale doesn’t like him anymore.

Craig: He rescued him earlier, but now he’s like, screw you. If you’re going to hang out with my arch nemesis. And so the morning comes and Jacob is like, he holds a gun on Nolan and he’s like, we’re going back or whatever. But then the Orca pushes an iceberg. Slow.

And Nolan’s like, get me the harpoon. He has to come up for air and he does it. It’s, uh, a hand a hand held like spear harpoon, like surely they don’t even really make those anymore. Who is. Who is harpooning whales with handheld Spears, Nolan, apparently. Um, but he, he does harpoon it like right above its head and it cries, but then the iceberg hits the boat.

Jacob is crushed and killed by falling ice from the iceberg. The boat, totally sinks and Nolan and Rachel jump onto like an ice float and what I was thinking, it was like, it really doesn’t matter how this turns out at this point, because you’re dead. Like, what are you going to do? Floating on? Like this 15 by 15 ice float in the Arctic ocean.

Nobody knows you’re there late. The whale can get you, or you can freeze to death. Like, these are your

Todd: options. We know he’s dead, but we also know Rachel’s going to be alive because we’ve been hearing Rachel narrate every now and then the whole thing, the whole thing. Yeah. Which was kind of annoying. I thought that sheep and the movie a little bit, like she just said there was nothing that she said that wasn’t already obvious, uh, distinctly didn’t need to happen, but yeah, but this part, I mean, it was so classic adventure movie, right.

I loved it. That’s what I loved about it. Like, yeah. I’d like now we’re on the ice flow. I can, they’re running around. And the whales poking bashing up through the bottom and they’re running. And then like, they get kind of on land to this ice cave, but he slips and falls down a back onto the ice float, which cracks away.

And the, and the whale pushes him on this ice flow almost again, like, like, like a Looney tunes, cartoon, you know, this one guy’s out on this sheet of ice it’s floating away and he can’t get back on the land. And then. It comes up and it comes over the edge. And I just looked, I was watching this with my wife and she was like, ah, yeah, in the whale.

Yeah. Politically tips this thing up on its edge. And he slides down at like a slide and I thought it was going to be straight into the whale’s mouth or something, you know, I did too, but it didn’t happen. He falls in the water.

Craig: What I was thinking like as, as old timey adventure movie, as this was. These killer whales are super smart and they do this shit.

I have seen actual footage of them doing this. Like they will get sea lions or whatever. You know, trapped on these ice floats and then their entire pods will organize and we’ll systematically like swim at them to tip them off. And it’s crazy. They are really smart and they are ruthless killer. I mean, they’re hunters, it’s its nature there, you know?

They need to eat too. It’s just crazy how innovative they can be. So as, as cartoonish as this looks, I was like, yeah, that, that will, could really do

sure. But it gets him down into the water and then it’s circling him and it uses its tail to throw it up. Out of, to throw Nolan up out of the water against an ice wall and he dies and sinks into the water. And I thought, Oh, well, that was silly too. And then I was reading. I think they do that too. Oh really?

Yes. They do that to see lions and stuff. Stuff, they will flip them out of the water with their tails against rocks or icebergs or whatever to stun or kill them. And then they’ll eat them. Isn’t that crazy?

Todd: The dolphins also like kill sea lions somehow, and then play with their corpses, like bat them around like, like balls.

Yeah,

Craig: they’ll straight up rape you.

Todd: Oh, well really I’ve swung with a

Craig: diamond. I haven’t had the experience, but they will,

Todd: will don’t turn your back on a dolphin. I don’t

Craig: know, but he dies and sinks into the water. And then the whale looks at Rachel with a tear and it’s out literally. Yes, let’s do it. And then it, it leaves it lets her go and a helicopter arrives.

Uh, what well, helicopter

Todd: coverup there was, you know, earlier Jacob had called an SOS or a may day, and he had said, I’m going to put it on auto repeat or something. So I think the implication is some time between him doing that. And the five minutes later, when the boat sunk, it was enough to call somebody.

So, uh, so yeah, but yeah, you’re right. That comes over. And then the last bit is a cool bit of underwater photography where the whale is. You know, going under the ice and his, some of his POV, you have him POV of from him. And some of it is of him. And it kind of looks like the whales trying to get up through the ice, but CAD.

And because earlier we had heard. You know, Nolan surmised that the whale might get trapped under the ice and not be able to get up. The implication that I got was that maybe the whale to also do

Craig: well, I read that that was supposed to be the implication, but my feelings about it were that it was. So distraught, like by this series of events that it intentionally killed itself.

That’s that’s that, that was how I, so it

Todd: could join it’s wife and son and heaven.

Craig: Okay. I guess I hope so. I don’t know that poor whale, the poor whale is the victim in this whole thing. I mean, that was seriously, that scene was traumatic than the. Him just there in the water, helpless watching his mate, you know, in, in such a horrifying circumstance.

I re like it really tugged at my heartstrings.

Todd: It’s so funny when we, when we talk about these movies, Craig, in this violence towards animals, w we’ll just kind of breeze right through. Yeah. So, you know, we’re at hostel and the guys, you know, teamed up and his arm gets cut off and they take pliers to his balls and rip out this girl’s eyes and move on it.

Tugs at your heartstrings, like, uh, this dog getting kicked across a room might. So

Craig: for the most, most part animals, you know, they don’t do anything to deserve it. Those Bedlam or hostel movies are all kind of jerks out scare what happens to them. But, um, these whales were just minding their business. They weren’t hurting anybody.

Todd: He really awaiting the birth of their, their new site so that dad could go leave him and. To his own pot and rape a few other whales. I,

Craig: uh, I have to say, I was really pleasantly surprised by this movie. I enjoyed it and I didn’t expect to at all, if anything, I thought, Oh, this will be really fun to talk about.

Cause it’ll be so bad. We’ll have fun goofing on it. And then I was watching him like, I actually kinda liked this. And like you said, it, I do think it’s better than some of the jaws sequels.

Todd: Yeah. I mean, it was bad in, in, in many ways though, but it overcame that with just, and, and you know, now that we’ve talked about this and I think we’re going to get comments tomorrow because we have been kind of really hitting the.

Fun parts and really talking about how cool some of these set pieces in these scenes are and how emotional some of the bits are, and kind of glossing over the fact that in between all of that, it can be a bit of a slog. It does move, but there are, there’s a lot of downtime of just kind of brooding and thinking, you know, talking about the whale and talking

Craig: no more so than in jaws.

Yeah, I would, I would say that maybe even, maybe even then in jaws, like the action jaws is a great movie and I am not trying to disparage it in any way, but the action with the shark. Until the end is kind of few and far between, um, and here stuff is happening all the time. Yes. There are moments and scenes of talking that are somewhat unnecessary.

Cause it’s not like we don’t understand what’s going on. But I have to disagree with you on that part. I didn’t feel that way at all. Jaws.

Todd: The first one though, is it’s a smarter movie. And so I think that those bits in between are more compelling. And in this movie, if you’re not, it’s more character driven.

Yeah. Yeah. And in this movie, if you’re not buying into it, like we were, and if you’re not willing to just forego some of the cheesiness and you can’t really get over that. Then I think you probably would think that these bits in between are dumb and slow, you know? Fair enough. But, so, yeah, I just want to put that out there because people are probably going to comment on it that, you know, it really just depends on what you’re willing to deal with to put up with and the mindset you’re in.

I like you thought it was a lot of fun and in many ways, just a very classic adventure story. These set big set pieces that they had. Um, I too was pleasantly surprised. I thought it would be way stupider and way more eye rolling than it is. And, you know, I think a lot of pieces go into that. Obviously the acting is, is pretty, is pretty great.

Yep. And it was fun to see these actors that we know and that we love the story was interesting and different from jaws, which made it good. Yeah. It wasn’t. Yeah. Super exploitative, I would say, um, it had some strong character elements to it. And once again, a great score, uh, to lift it up, uh, that you just can’t say a bad thing about, so a fitting tribute, I think, to any  for, for this

Craig: year.

Agreed. I very much enjoyed it.

Todd: All right. Well, thank you very much for listening to another episode. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend. You can find us online, just search for two guys in a chainsaw. Find our Facebook page, our homepage, two guys at red 49. Leave us a comment there. I’ll give us some requests, which you’d like us to do.

And we have at least one more tribute episode coming up before we might get to some quests. We might get to some other steam episodes. We’re just not sure. So let us know what you want. We always enjoy chatting and talking with you until next time. I’m Todd

Craig: and I’m Craig.

Todd: with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

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