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Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009)

Dir: Júlíus Kemp

A multi-cultural bunch of tourists in Iceland take a ‘whale watching’ trip out to sea on a fishing boat of Captain Pétur (Gunnar Hansen) and his sleazy deck hand.
But obnoxious, drunken, Frenchman (I’m saying nothing!) Jean Francois (Aymen Hamdouchi) causes an accident that sees Captain Pétur seriously injured.

Help seemingly arrives in the form a scruffy looking man (Helgi Björnsson) who takes the group onto his small boat but announces a storm is coming so they’ll have to wait it out on his family’s large fishing vessel.

Unfortunately for the tourists his family are a bunch of tourist/environmentalist murdering bunch of psychos who, after the ban on whaling, have turned to robbery and butchery.
And sure enough soon after meeting the man’s mother (Gudrun Gisladottir) and perverted brother (Stefan Jonsson) the group are fighting for their lives…

Iceland, along with Japan and Norway, was a heavy whaling nation before international law banned commercial whaling.
What was a right-thinking action did have an effect on local economies though.
This is where the ‘whale watching tours’ come in, which means a crew that made a living from hunting whales can now try to make a living taking tourists out to watch the whales instead.

But in Iceland’s first full on exploitation movie the makers invent a scenario where some ex-whalers have taken to murdering tourists instead of taking them on sight-seeing trips.
This loss of income and lifestyle is a nicely Icelandic take on the ‘automated butchery’ change that put the family out of business in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” of course…something obviously intentional by writer Sjón Sigurdsson, a noted novelist and lyricist who works regularly with barmy Björk.

And for the most part this local take on that idea works very well and offers up a generally well paced, well made, successful (if highly eccentric) take on the ‘family of killers’ set-up.
That’s not to say the screenplay does not have some faults, in the first part of the film, with excess baggage and flab.
The opening sequence is too long for example and gets the film off to a weak start and why we need to see, no less than four times, one of the girls (who’s late for the trip) running for the boat, especially when she makes it anyway so nothing plot wise has been gained, is anyone’s business. Running along a road is hardly characterisation is it? It’s an example of blubber that needed cutting.
And when added to the large group of, pretty much all unlikeable at the moment, characters that spend most of the opening arguing, puking and being stupid, the first 15 minutes of the film do not herald much hope for the audience, away from a nicely messy (though off-frame) axe death.

Thankfully though, once the utterly wasted and dubbed over Gunnar Hansen is injured (in one of the worst above the title name dropping cameos out!), the film starts to come to life and at last the screenplay is concerning itself on specifics and becoming focused.
And now the uncertain pace and feel of the movie also improves as barely a minute has passed ,after the group has climbed aboard the charnel boat, before the nicely nasty gore and violence is unleashed.

And, although pretty sparse, this violence and gore is well done and delivers the goods.
People are despatched by knife, hammer, axe, shotgun and even (in a silly but great scene, that’s unique as far as I know, a welcome thing itself in a horror movie) a ship deck harpoon gun!
Certainly heads more than roll in this sucker.
We also have some nicely gratuitous breast exposure to add to the pile of grimy exploitation goodies on offer.

So as a ‘backwaves psycho family flick’ the film works well and delivers all it should even if there is nothing groundbreaking or surprising here and even if the killers are rather generic.
But there is more here thanks to the unusual screenplay by Sigurdsson that offers up some sudden surprises as far as characters go and how the set-up plays out.
As far as characters go the most bizarre is Endo (Nae), who is the maid to a Japanese couple in the group, who for the first half of the film blends blandly into the background before she explodes front and centre as her truly vicious and mercenary personality is revealed. She’s a major highlight.
There’s also a very nice and unusual about-turn concerning the two main young girls in the group as audience perceptions are turned on their head.

The humour and seriousness is not mixed well though. Or is it? I’m not sure.
Damn the wonderful strangeness of this film!
Not that what’s serious is not effective or what’s funny (in a mild, black, inappropriate way) isn’t amusing. It’s just that the humour seems misplaced and jarring in the context it appears.
A revelation concerning the black guy Leon (Terence Anderson) for example is a damn funny, unexpected, moment but the timing of it seems inappropriate to the seriousness of the film at this point.
And yet the last part of the movie becomes so damn off-the wall and so full of unexpected events (that move the film away from its basic set-up) that perhaps this humour during the main bulk of the film is meant to be a stepping stone for the audience to ease them into the craziness to come.

The choice to split the action up into various locales at about the 60 minute mark, that heralds this crazy turn in the film, is a double edged sword also.
It makes for a nice twist on the cliché “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” style set-up but it fragments the narrative at a crucial point, where by rights the build-up should be getting more intensely structured hurtling the audience along, and instead it slows the film down and give the last 15 minutes or so of the running time a lot of new plot to cover.
But thankfully what it also does is to cleverly (actually quite bravely) open up the opportunity for the film to now deliver some unexpected (ironic, wicked and often bizarre) events that are pretty much its own and offer up new takes on the compact, by now playing out as you would expect, ‘stalk ‘n’ slash’ structure that the film was up to this moment following.

As such the final 20 minutes of the film, a film that has indeed been (as its lure the punters edit, of a ‘Billy Chainsaw’, publicity quote on the DVD hammers home) toying with doing “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” at sea, suddenly becomes a delightfully eccentric work full of unexpected twists (bar one clumsily obvious outcome involving guns) and weird events and (at last) truly forges its own identity.
Leon does commit a couple of bad, cliché Slasher movie (although this is not really a Slasher movie), faux pas in what he decides to do and not do during this part of the film…but really this is when “Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre” becomes a very unusual, even unique, work that defies the audience’s expectations.

Overall then this is a pretty standard, but well made and satisfying, take on an exploitation, psycho family, horror film that we have all seen countless times before.
And if the start of the film is flabby and weak the use of the sea and the Icelandic cultural takes in the set-up add something different and when the film kicks the killing off we have a good, if unexceptional, horror film.
But when the screenplay becomes brave enough to do its own thing this well above average horror film becomes something extra special and unexpected (almost as unexpected as the ‘Thanks to’ Barack Obama credit at the end in fact!) and as such gets a whale-sized, hearty, recommendation.