Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre Blu-ray Movie Review

Captain Leatherface goes boating.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater December 17, 2010

A few weeks ago, while skimming the list of upcoming films I’d be reviewing, the title Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre understandably caught my eye. For some reason—I think it’s because I had just watched The Cove, the expose about dolphin slaughtering in Japan—I assumed Harpoon would be an anti-whaling documentary, a kind of condensed version of Whale Wars, the reality TV show that follows activist group Sea Shepherd as they attempt to outmaneuver and sabotage Japanese whaling vessels. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received my review copy, its cover art dominated by five dead human bodies skewered shish-kabob-style on an enormous, bloodstained harpoon. The film’s tagline? “The catch of the day…is you.” Of course, if the film’s U.S. distributors had stuck with its original title, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, I might have caught the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reference more easily. And that, essentially, is what Harpoon is— Texas Chainsaw on the high seas, trading the family of deranged out-of-work slaughterhouse workers in Tobe Hooper’s horror classic for an equally unhinged family of erstwhile Icelandic whalers. Gunnar Hansen, the leather-faced star of Texas Chainsaw—who was born in Iceland— even makes a glorified cameo here. The film is more of a tongue-in-cheek homage than an outright rip-off, but it unfortunately falls prey to the clichés and contrivances of the slasher genre that Chainsaw helped create.

And so the massacre begins...

Slasher films don’t have stories, they have scenarios, almost always involving a group of idiots running away from—and, ultimately, getting gorily dispatched by—one or more homicidal maniacs. The only variations are the characters, the location, and the reason for the killer’s madness. Will it be counselors at a lakeside summer camp, hunted down by the revenge-driven mother of a drowned camper? Sleepy teens picked off in their dreams by a nightmare molester? Co-eds in a sorority house offed by a drill-wielding sex fiend? The options are both limitless and severely limiting, which is why the sub-genre, post-Scream, seems so tired, each new entry eliciting only comparisons to what has come before and maybe garnering some faint praise for making minor tweaks to a rigid storytelling template. (Or, coming up with some never-before-seen kills, the sub-genre’s benchmarks for innovation.) The best you can ever say about a slasher film is that it’s good at being a slasher film, that it’s scary and suspenseful, or, failing that, at least disturbingly visceral enough to sate the bloodlust of the gorehounds in the audience. Harpoon, Iceland’s first real attempt at hardcore horror—albeit, one splattered with black-as-coagulated blood-but-just-as-stale comedy—is merely mediocre. The setting is unique, and there are a few groan-worthy kills, but the film sinks under the weight of annoying characters and poor, plot hole-filled writing.

We join a group of international tourists as they board a rickety whale-watching vessel for a three-hour tour. The passengers exist to be fodder for the horrors to come, so this motley crew is painted in the broadest, shallowest, most stereotypical strokes. We have an obnoxious Frenchman, a gaggle of camcorder-toting Japanese, and three racist German middle-aged cougars on the prowl for young meat. There are two occasionally indistinguishable blonds—one a gay-hating Bible-belt American whose fiancé just died—and a gay black man who will eventually become our tragic hero. When the captain on this ill-fated voyage—played ever so briefly by the top-billed Gunnar Hansen—is accidentally speared through the chest with an errant harpoon, the passengers are “rescued” by two scraggly ex-whalers who live on a derelict ship. In a previous scene—just to let us know they’re the baddies—we see them sharing a gross-ass-looking sausage lunch with their religious nutso mother. “These American whale- huggers have turned our government into a bunch of whale-loving sissies,” says one. “Yeah, brother,” replies the other, “once Icelanders were Vikings…now we are nothing but babies.” They make a joke about how Greenpeace should be called “green piss” and the mother gets angry at them for swearing. She’s okay with murder, though, apparently, because as soon as the brothers bring the stranded passengers aboard their floating man- meat abattoir, the bloodletting begins.

And rarely relents. Obviously, there are multiple kills involving harpoons, the best of which has one poor potential escapee swimming for his life while the eldest psychopath brother looses a spear from his prow-mounted cannon. While the swimmer splashes in a panic away from the boat, the spear seems to hang in the air for an eternity before arcing downward for the fatal penetrating blow. (The kabob skewer from the cover does appear, but only appears in a diminished form, with two—not five—victims pierced together.) Elsewhere, there’s a kamikaze suicide bomb attack, a hammer to a woman’s forehead, the requisite flare gun getting fired into someone’s face, and two decapitations—one a severing ax blow and the other a shotgun blast that might as well be called an annihila-capitation for all that’s left of the chump’s dome piece. If you follow these kinds of films, you’ve doubtlessly seen all of this before. It’s neither scary nor particularly shocking. Far more traumatizing is the montage that starts the film, vintage footage of whales being sliced open, de-finned, and dismantled.

Besides using Iceland’s now-defunct whaling industry as a backdrop, the film also tries to comment on other social issues—homophobia and xenophobia, mainly—but it really doesn’t have much to say. Screenwriter Sjón Sigurdsson, who, oddly enough, co-wrote the lyrics to the songs in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, attempts to satirize his characters by making them out to be racists, homophobes, and/or unkind toward the mentally challenged. These are modern stand-ins, of a sort, for sex, drinking, and drugs—the kinds of activities that would get kids killed in 1980s slashers. I guess the moral here, if you want to call it that, is that there’s a high price to pay for being un-PC. And yet, the film also pokes fun at people who are politically correct to the point of being namby-pamby imbeciles. Whatever. None of it is very funny, and director Júlíus Kemp struggles to find a balance between horror and comedy. The film’s most glaring weakness, however, is the broken structure of the narrative, which is riddled with holes and never arrives at a coherent conclusion. I suppose if you’re just here to watch the massacre, this won’t really matter, but it keeps Harpoon from being a top-tier slasher.

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Like a lot of horror films, Harpoon is an intentionally bleak and murky visual experience, but I actually quite liked the look of the film's cinematography. The 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is covered in a layer of gritty but pleasing grain, giving the image a warm, filmic texture. Clarity is somewhat inconsistent—things soften up considerably during the darker scenes—but most of the time detail is refined, especially in the bloody, weather- beaten faces of the killers and their victims. Color is restrained and slightly stylized, and while there are few truly vivid tones, there's a constant sense of density in the hues. (That is, the picture never looks wishy-washy.) Likewise, black levels are adequately deep and contrast is strong, although sequences below deck have a tendency to get perhaps overly dark and dank. The encode is solid as well, with no aggressive noise issues, macroblocking, banding, or other compression troubles.

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I have no real issues with the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track—which I'll get to in a bit—but I would've appreciated some subtitle options on this disc. There are hardcoded subs that appear during non-English sections—you'll hear Icelandic, of course, but also some French and Japanese—but there nothing for when the characters are speaking English. This is a bummer for hard-of-hearing viewers, obviously, but even if you've got cat-like hearing, you'll occasionally have a hard time making out the heavy accents that some of the actors have. Anyway, the mix itself is fairly strong, if not quite as involving as the sound design of other, more bombastic horror films. Harpoon's sound design makes occasional use of the movie's maritime setting, filling the rear channels with squawking gulls, lapping water, distant horns in the harbor, and the other forms of oceanic ambience. More probably could've been done to establish an all-enveloping oh crap I'm stuck on a boat in the middle of the ocean with lunatic former whalers vibe, but overall, the track offers a satisfying amount of aural activity. The LFE channel even gets a few chances to rumble, which I wasn't necessarily expecting. There are some sudden jolts in volume you'll want to look out for, but otherwise, the mix is nicely balanced, with a satisfying blend of score, effects, ambience, and dialogue.

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes of Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre (SD, 15:40): An assemblage of on-set footage intercut with an interview with Gunnar Hansen, who discusses his experience working on the film.
• Trailer (SD, 1:32)

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre did nothing for me—I found it more tedious than anything—but if you're the sort that follows the slasher scene closely, you might find it worthwhile, if only for the novel setting. For a more gleefully violent and fun foreign horror movie, I'd recommend Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola's Nazi-zombie film, Dead Snow.