Editorials
‘Orca: The Killer Whale’ – One of the Few ‘Jaws’ Knockoffs That Stands On Its Own
The sights and sounds we take in growing up often have the power to stick with us well into adulthood. These images can be from film or television and can encompass any tone or genre of storytelling. More often than not, however, it’s the stuff that frightened and disturbed us in those formative years that tends to stick to the walls of memory the hardest.
The Internet is awash with content centered around people sharing those moments across media that scarred their growing psyches, ranging from more well-known media to more obscure stuff. Those moments in film and TV that gave us a shock to the system. Things that, for some reason or another, hit us at just the right moment to carve a lasting memory.
For me personally, one of those things is the 1977 Dino De Laurentiis produced Jaws knock-off, Orca: The Killer Whale.
Directed by Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run), the film is about the life and death feud between fisherman Captain Nolan (Richard Harris) and a killer whale he inadvertently took everything from. Yes, the titular Orca is hellbent on revenge, and the tone of the film is utterly serious, which makes it all the more compelling.
In my write-up of 1980’s Alligator I discussed at length that so much of the media that genuinely got under my skin as a child revolved around aquatic themed horror, all thanks to Jaws. Nature Strikes Back creature-features were some of my favorite genre films to catch on the tube or rent from the local Blockbuster as a wee one. Many were good, some were not. Orca is one particular post-Jaws animal attack film that has always struck a chord with me. One scene in particular “speared” itself into my memory for life.
I remember catching Orca on TV as a child just as Captain Nolan begins his hunt for the sea dwelling mammal. See, Nolan isn’t looking to kill an Orca, but merely catch one to sell to pay off some debts and finance his trip back home to Ireland. Disregarding the advice of the locals and Charlotte Rampling’s cetologist, Dr. Bedford, Nolan proceeds with his fishing quest. It soon goes south—and fast. Nolan accidentally harpoons a female Orca, who tries to kills itself on the propellers before getting hauled on deck.
As it turns out, the female Orca was pregnant, and she miscarries on the deck. The bloody fetus bursts from the womb to the shock and horror of the crew. Needless to say, little me did NOT expect to see an image so traumatizing from what I innocently assumed to be a simple monster movie about a killer whale.
The Orca miscarriage was such a blunt, brutal bit of business I honestly don’t know if I finished the film that day. Watching it today, it still manages to shock and unsettle me. The despair and horror the Orca experiences during this segment is raw and emotionally powerful, and as we see the male Orca watch his family being taken from him, we’re aching to see the guy go Death Wish on Nolan and his crew.
Therein lies the trick of Orca. It manages to get the audience to invest completely in this tale of an ocean mammal on a warpath of revenge. The film quickly establishes the supreme intelligence of the species, making it easy to suspend disbelief for those willing to go with the flow. Revenge narratives are just easy to get into, even if the revenge is being wrought by a killer whale.
The film is also intelligent enough to give Orca (that’s his name, I don’t care) plenty of screen time. There is no hiding of the monster here, because the narrative doesn’t frame him as the monster. There are several close-ups of his eyes that convey a range of emotions. From sadness to cunning and to rage. The effects hold up incredibly well, too. The editing between live Orca footage and model Orcas is pretty tight and convincing, and the film even manages to make the beast genuinely scary by taking advantage of the scale between man and killer whale. Shots of the towering dorsal fin honing in on Nolan during the film’s arctic-set climax are particularly harrowing.
Orca himself makes for an easy to root for hero, and make no mistake, he is the hero of the film. The script is smart enough to make Nolan a dimensional man who feels true remorse for what he did to Orca’s family, but we still want to see Orca win, and win he does. So many Nature Strikes Back films end with the animal(s) dying in the end, even if the story frames them sympathetically. Orca has the balls to not only kill off its human star, but it also lets the animal live through the encounter.
Orca is one hell of an entertaining film. It’s paced exceedingly well, the set pieces are fun and memorable, it boasts an above average cast for a Jaws knock-off, and it’s flat out emotionally compelling. The battle between Nolan and Orca gets outright mythic as the film progresses.
With three good leads (yes, Orca is one of those three), strong directing, a handful of arresting images, and a moving score by Ennio Morricone to put the cherry on top, Orca: The Killer Whale is one of the few Jaws rip-offs that stands on its own. It’s definitely one of the best.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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