Harpoon: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (V)
| release date | December 7 2010 |
| studio | Image Entertainment |
| director | Julius Kemp |
| writer | Sjón Sigurdsson |
| starring | Gunnar Hansen, Pihla Viitala, Nae, Terence Anderson, Miranda Hennessy, Aymen Hamdouchi |
| site | harpoonthemovie.com |
| trailer 1 | Trailer #1 |
3 Comments
Unevenly shot, placed, and paced horror that is stocked with mostly irritating and goofy characters. There is some bloodshed and a couple slasher kills (incl. a hammer smash to the face, thank you), but the movie is so plotless and full of bad dialogue that the violent elements get lost in the mess. The premise of Wrong-Turnish action on an Icelandic boat sounded pretty cool, but the actual movie isn’t that much fun…pass
Imagine some kind of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” on a whaling ship – that’s “Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre”, one of the very first horror movies from Iceland; a decent but sadly quite underwhelming gorefest.
Tense and entertaining in the first half, boring and stupid in the second half. The cast is awesome (great performances from Pihla Viitala, Helgi Björnsson and Gunnar “Leatherface” Hansen), sadly most of the characters are absolutely unlikable, especially the annoying Frenchman and the unbearably ferocious blonde girl.
The soundtrack from the great Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson is beautiful, cinematographically it’s mostly very satisfying and the kills are all terrific (slit throats, decapitations, harpoon kills, gruesome burnings…). Unfortunately the script is really, REALLY bad, including loads of completely illogical plot points, unnecessarily tedious scenes, large plot holes and one of the most stupid endings I’ve seen in a looong time.
Good gore wasted on a bad flick.I watched it on cable so all it cost me was time.Watch if you dare.You’ve been warned!Bad acting,plot holes,Killer Whale,and an mysterious Asian lady that’s a bad ass.With all that it’s a TCM ripoff done poorly.
Harpoon is an inventively bloody, odd, different, darkly humorous slasher film that had entertaining characters with nothing average about it. It’s like Dead Calm meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Deadly Voyage meets Jason Takes Manhattan and it was very old school indeed but man the deaths were great and creative. The acting was good for the most part but the lack of character developement from most made it hard to care about them and like them but some of them were written pretty cleverly and made smart decisions when it comes to survive but on the other hand some of them made pretty dumb decisions but the standout and most brilliant one to me was Nae who played Endo, what a bad ass, tough chick and a firecracker not to be mess with, she was so entertaining. I never thought that the movie was scary just very disturbing and intense just like right out of a bad nightmare but it was so over the top that it was more entertaining than anything truly terrifying, the ending though was just lackluster and should of been better. Overall it’s different from the average slasher film but at the same time it’s just as disposable as the average slasher film mostly due to lack of story, character developement, scares and suspense but it’s superior when it came to inventive kills, atmosphere and dark zaniness but it’s pretty much Hostel on a boat and decent one at that. Rent it one day but not a must see. 5.9 out of 10.
Interesting kills, but hard to buy into.