Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) by Matt Wavish (Pazuzu)

Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009)
Directed by: Júlíus Kemp
Written by: Sjón Sigurdsson
Starring: Gunnar Hansen, Nae, Pihla Viitala, Terence Anderson

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQgNRCHfgMk[/youtube]

To be fair to this tacky horror, its heart is in the right place, it just doesn’t deliver the goods. The introduction is filled with upsetting scenes of whales being harpooned and slaughtered. It is made up of obvious real footage, accompanied by some rather impressive music to add to the feeling that what you are seeing is a savage thing. It’s actually quite powerful. Suddenly it stops and we move swiftly on to the usual cheap rock music, a bar and a bunch of drunks, two girls who can’t act for shit, a girl snorting coke in the toilets with her boyfriend trying to smash the door down to get his stuff back, and then one of the two girls drunkenly goes home with an older hippie type guy. A million miles from the rather impressive opening scenes.

And from then on, it’s all familiar stuff as we are gradually introduced to the tourists waiting at the docks for a rusty old ex-fishing boat that will take them on a tour of the waters of Iceland and to do some whale watching. We have 3 old, stuck up old bag types, a typical Japanese family with a father who seems to have no idea how to communicate with any but his own, a drunken French yob who, to be perfectly honest, is a bit of a dick, a sexy blonde who appear to have her head screwed on, another sexy blonde who can’t seem to help attracting the attention of nasty men, and we also have the token black guy (not meant to be racist in anyway, i am merely making a point that this film has covered all the cliché’s), and this black guy is really REALLY irritating, he cannot act and seems to be on some kind of tough guy mission. He has been given a dreadful script “try me, we have all the time in the world, don’t look like we aint gonna see no whales” and when he says his lines they are truly cringe worthy!

The captain takes the boat out while his assistant tries to rape one of the blondes, nice people! The drunken French guy climbs a mast and continues being a twat, falls off and in the process pretty much kills the captain by accidentally putting a great big spike through him! The captain’s assistant takes the lifeboat and leaves the tourists to it. Along comes a boat of a family of Greenpeace haters, hell-bent on murder and mayhem, and this is what follows. Once they get all the tourists on their boat, they hunt them all down like dogs. Nothing new, a lack of tension and little gore make this horror nothing special at all. It follows every horror rule without adding anything new to it. It quickly becomes boring. None of the deaths are really worth mentioning because they didn’t really capture my interest, and you could pretty much see what was gonna happen a mile off.

There are a couple of twists at the end which, by that time you will have given up caring. There is a small ray of hope in the last five minutes as two of the girls argue (very very annoying) and become the prey of something other than the crazed family, but even this is delivered lazily. The final payoff scene I’m assuming is meant to disturb, or at least make you feel pretty bad for the person involved. I didn’t, I switched it off and didn’t give it anymore thought

Rating:

[pt-filmtitle]Harpoon The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre[/pt-filmtitle]