‘Killer Whale’ Review: Aquatic Horror-Thriller Simply Serves Its Porpoise

Some animals have better publicists than others. Sure, sharks have killed a few people here and there, but thanks to movies like “Jaws” and “The Shallows” everyone thinks they’re all man-eating murder beasts. Meanwhile, hippopotamuses kill about 500 people every year and we sing cutesy Christmas songs about wanting them as pets. I don’t know which PR firm handles all the hippos but they’re the best in the world, baby, I can tell you that much.

And yet, killer whales have always wrestled with their public image. Thanks to SeaWorld, “Free Willy” and that adorable thing where they sometimes wear a salmon as a hat, people see orcas as lovable, sympathetic creatures. You would think that would be enough to placate their egos, but it’s pretty obvious they would rather to be seen as badasses. So we get movies like the 1977 cult classic “Orca” and Jo-Anne Brechin’s new “Killer Whale,” which argue that these porpoises are the alpha predators of the seven seas. And maybe they are, but the label never quite sticks.

So making any horror movie bout a killer whale, even though “killer” is in the title, is kinda like making a badass action movie starring Ms. Rachel. Through no fault of her own, the sudden shift in career trajectory would just be a little hard to accept, even if she was a Green Beret before she became a family-friendly YouTuber. (She wasn’t. That was a joke. Don’t spread that rumor around.)

“Killer Whale” stars Virginia Gardner as Maddie, a cellist whose boyfriend dies tragically in a robbery gone wrong, which also left her with permanent hearing loss. A year later, Maddie’s best friend Trish (Mel Jarnson) convinces her to take a vacation to Thailand to relax, let their hair down, and finally visit her favorite orca, Ceto, who has been suffering in captivity for years. Maddie hates the idea, since she doesn’t want to support Ceto’s exploitation and abuse, but they sneak in after hours, and Maddie watches the orca murder one of the park’s janitors.

It turns out Ceto is pretty pissed off — and rightly so — about her mistreatment, so she’s been killing people for a while now. The most recent murder is the last straw, prompting the park management to dump her back into the ocean, off-camera, at an atoll where she is, ironically, still trapped. That just happens to be the same atoll where Maddie, Trish and their hunky guide Josh (Mitchell Hope) decide to spend a sexy afternoon — a huge coincidence, even in a movie as contrived as this. Soon, they’re trapped on a rock, seriously injured, while a killer whale circles them, waiting to strike.

If the premise sounds eerily reminiscent of “The Shallows,” don’t worry, it’s also eerily reminiscent of “Fall,” another film about getting trapped in a remote, deadly location with your best friend, which also starred Virginia Gardner. (Do you think she said something? Like, “Hey Lionsgate, didn’t we already do this one?”) The scripts for these two movies seem to have been ripped up, rolled around in a bingo machine, and then slapped together using Scotch tape. It’s clear where all the pieces came from, but with one noteworthy exception there are no surprises, just remixes.

That said, the reason we have formulas is because the formulas work, and Brechin makes “Killer Whale” work. Almost nothing she could do would spin this everyday hay into gold, but she can remind us why we keep hay around in the first place. Sometimes all you have to do is put your characters in an impossible situation and watch them try, and mostly fail, to get out of it. There’s blood in the water. The stakes and the tide keep rising. They’ll die if they swim for it. They’ll die if they don’t. So what the heck are they going to do?

Brechin sometimes struggles to make the film’s hacky first act seem plausible, but once the premise kicks in “Killer Whale” is a well-orchestrated, albeit very familiar chiller. Of course a film like this couldn’t function without a game cast. Gardner and Jarnson were hired to carry the film all by themselves, on a tiny rock, and they do that job. Granted, we already knew Gardner could do that job, since “Fall” was already a fun fright flick, but Jarnson is an interesting performer and seems to have a bright future ahead of her as well. As for the whale … yeah, it looks like a whale. Not much more you can ask, I suppose.

Brechin’s film probably won’t replace “Free Willy” as anyone’s favorite orca movie, but if you’re hellbent on making “Kill Willy,” you could do a lot worse. Not much worse, since it’s not like there’s a lot of competition out there in the murder-porpoise genre, but that’s not “Killer Whale’s” fault. That’s the fault of the orcas’ publicists.

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