6.1 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
When a bloody freak accident takes out their captain, a boatload of international tourists on a whale watching expedition must fight for their lives while stranded in the middle of the ocean. Help seems to arrive from a nearby whaler who offers to take them back to shore, but instead strands them on a rusty, terrifying barge of death with his insane family who are determined to hunt down and kill the trespassers one by one! Featuring an appearance by horror legend Gunnar Hansen (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this shocking, blood-splattered trip on the high seas unleashes a night of terror only a lucky few will survive.
Starring: Gunnar Hansen, Nae Yuuki, Terence Anderson, Miranda Hennessy, Helgi BjörnssonHorror | 100% |
Foreign | 14% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
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...
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.
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 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.
1989
1980
1989
2003
2014
Curse III: Panga
1991
Dungeons of Horror
1962
El buque maldito
1974
Død snø
2009
2005
Hatchet IV
2017
1987
2007
2008
2009
#66
2017
Collector's Edition
1988
2018
1990
#32
2010