Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre

What a poster! What a title! What a stinking piece of arctic garbage! Simple enough story. Group of unrelated people set off on a whale watching expedition. Something goes awry. Bad family of crazies show up. Tourists think they're being rescued. People start dying. Try to survive. There ya go.

What a stinking horrible summary that was, huh!? And I could give a crap! This flick in no way deserves my cognitive efforts, and if you think you're gonna read a review that cares...get ready for a supriseis!!1

I really don't even know where to start. I suppose starting with the good is the best case here...since anything positive was entirely slim-pickings. The make-up and blood effects were impressive. The ending was grim. That's it.

The bad...which I forbid to dwell upon, encompassed everything else. The acting was amateur, the writing awful, the use of a Bjork song was appalling, the characters were annoying, and the direction....A word...A word...A word......atrocious. Yes! And the entire movie itself....abysmal! Look at me go, Ma!! To be fair to the entire crew and what not, the productions were indeed slick, but when it came down to telling a solid horror story, it not only dropped the ball, it dropped the ball from the top of the Empire State Building into a pile of steaming Orca excrement. Don't let the positive reviews fool you, or the useful/not useful voting. This movie sucks my ass!

Just saw this "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" at the ScreamFest 2009 Film Festival and it was fantastic. A very droll and bloody film, "Massacre" follows a whale watching expedition that goes all kinds of wrong. The synopsis makes it appear like it will be "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on a whaling vessel, but it's much more than that. Plenty of splatter to go around, but made with great humor.

My wife and I briefly chatted with director Julius Kemp who was extremely polite and revealed that they indeed created the movie after coming up with the title as I guessed. The film is currently hitting the film festival circuit, so catch it if you can. There's no current distribution for the U.S., though it has been sold overseas in the U.K. and other countries.

With "Let the Right One In," "Dead Snow," and now "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre," Scandinavia is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of horror film making. Bravo.

HARPOON: THE REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE is billed as Iceland's first horror film and their answer to THE Texas CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, with the action shifted to an inhospitable landscape and a ship. Unfortunately, it turns out to be as dull-witted and laughable as many a Hollywood slasher sequel, a film that strives to be horrific and entertaining and yet which ends up a mess.

The first half of the film sets up the cast, which is fair enough, but it doesn't help that most of the characters are intensely irritating (with the exception of the black guy and the Japanese girl). Gunnar Hansen pops up for a worthless cameo, but after that we're mired in a mess of horror film clichés and predictable death sequences. It's all badly written and quite badly directed, two things which sap enjoyment from the production.

One thing HARPOON does have going for it are some explicit gore sequences, although these aren't quite as grisly as you'd expect, with the emphasis being on the staging of each effect rather than going all-out to gross-out the viewer. But such moments aren't enough to save what is another forgettable, lamentable horror yarn.

Around twenty minutes into this movie I started to wonder if "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" was meant to be a dark comedy. After all, how could this be a serious horror movie when it included scenes such as a traumatised woman singing Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet" over the loudspeakers of a ship whilst a tragedy occurs on the deck? Or the moment in the movie where the scene suddenly changes to a group of people discussing their love for whales? But if it's a comedy, where are all of the scenes designed to make you laugh - or at least smile? It's almost as though the scriptwriter was as confused about the movie they were making as I was about the movie I was watching.

Obviously "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" is a homage to the far superior "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - the original Leatherface (Gunner Hansen) even shows up here. However, everything that "Texas" did right, "Reykjavik" does wrong and then some. The victims here are some of the most one-dimensional stereotypes you could ever assemble from the loud, drunk Frenchman to the Japanese tourists with their camera gear, and none of them are particularly sympathetic or appealing. The only exception is a young black American man (portrayed by an actor in serious need of accent training) whose sexuality prompts one of the most unrealistic dialogue exchanges i've heard (and that's before you take into account the fact that this exchange takes place whilst the two characters are running for their lives from insane whalers). I'm not even sure who was supposed to be the main character in this movie which shows how problematic the story was.

This already unsteady boat is further sunk by gaping holes in logic which will leave you scratching your head in disbelief. For example, early in the movie we're introduced to a character whose presence seems to indicate that our victims have been lured into a trap. However, their fate actually has nothing to do with him but rather an unfortunate (and highly unlikely) accident. This is indicative of the poorly written script in which strangers suddenly and inexplicably relate their life stories to one another merely for the purpose of giving the audience some back-story, or act out of character to set up a specific plot point (see the crazy sequence of events which begins with the line "Your father was a real kamikaze!" for evidence of this).

There is only one death scene that is of any interest and the villains aren't terribly memorable. Whilst it's exciting to see a slasher movie emerge from somewhere other than America, I can't recommend "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" due to its many, many flaws. You would be advised not to waste your time and to instead watch a movie like 2006's "Severance" which manages to be both funny and frightening - two things which "Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre" completely fails to be.

So far the only thing we have seen from Iceland are Bjork, Sigur Ros, volcano's and whale hunting. Not many people know that Iceland was ready to deliver their first horror flick called Harpoon (or the longer for some unspeakable title Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre). And I must admit, it is a decent movie. Some people will have difficulties to understand the language used, there is the Icelandic language luckily subtitled but there is also a French guy trying to talk English and some Japanese who tries to talk English too. But you will get used to that. Second, one name is wheel known in the genre, Gunnar Hansen. He's in the movie because he's Icelandic, not as a teaser. The movie itself sometimes becomes really bloody and even gory, there is some kind of suspense and even some nudity. Okay, there are reviewers who pointed out that there are some flows in the story but I wasn't offended by it. It's about the guy who appears with a handicap, but I didn't have any problems with it. Anyway, it's a bit of TCM on a boat. It surely delivers the stuff you need for a horror and remember, it's the first film coming from that country in our genre, well done...