Imprisoned green activist: "Please, I'm a friend of nature!!"
Axe-wielding whale hunter: "Tell it to the axe."
Decapitation.
Awesome.
From where I first stood, parked in front of the "New Releases" section of the video store, looking for a fifth title to complete my harvest of the day (and benefit from the advantageous rate awarded to "film-vores"), Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre or Harpoon as I saw it packaged, with its picture of a large harpoon piercing through the body of four people on a bright red background, hardly seemed tempting. If it hadn't been for a rave review I had read in the previous days, I would've just laughed and picked Vous n'aimez pas la vérité instead (which I should've done then, but will do next week instead). The way I figured, titles like Harpoon are meant only to ornate video store shelves for a few weeks then return to the void from where they came. Honestly, I was so convinced by the awful cover art that the film was a straight-to-video American release that I would've betted on it. But in reality, the film is something else entirely. Well, it is and it isn't at the same time, because although it first manages to draw you right into its net (with gritty images, an intimate camera and an intriguing political agenda), your interest will eventually dwindle as it starts falling into all the traps cursing survivalist horror (devaluation of all characters, sudden shrinking of narrative possibilities and multiplication of silly plot twists, all for the purpose of fore-fronting a massacre that thus loses all of its relevance). Like the overconfident captain at the helm of a mighty ship, director Kemp has failed to see the sharp rocks protruding from the shallow waters right in front of him. He thus sails proudly at first, relying on his smarts and the awesome premise of his film, but is eventually overwhelmed by something he should've foreseen. The shining hull of his embarkation thus becomes twisted and torn, regurgitating the contents of its bowels out to sea. The final few shots of the film are great, but they can't salvage the sinking ship.
Since the film was marketed in North America as Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre, I had no idea about its Icelandic roots. Even if I had bothered to look at the cast list, I wouldn't have found out since there are actors from all around the globe here: there's a Finnish girl playing a German girl, a Japanese dubber from Brazil, a Londonese Arab playing an Algerian, a former Miss Iceland playing an American... and Gunnar Hansen, the prodigal son from Reykjavik, ready for an all-new massacre. It's really an incredible melting pot here, and you have to wonder why the makers of this film felt they needed such a mix-up of nationalities. But the crazy thing is that the eclectic cast largely contrived to unnatural roles outside of their personal linguistic proficiencies (I'm thinking mostly about Aymen Hamdouchi's painful rendition of the French language) actually manages to do a decent job, the main reason being that they each have little screen-time and limited interactions with the other actors. The film's problems lie elsewhere, first of all in the North-American packaging. I mean, why remove Reykjavik from the title and put Harpoon instead? I'm guessing the distributors wanted to conceal the Icelandic origin of the film... but why? The film is shot in English. The title is in English. It even involves a clever wordplay referencing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre which is completely lost in the process of inserting Harpoon. But most of all, the film has a political agenda pertaining specifically to Iceland's position within the "ethical" debate surrounding whale-hunting, an agenda whose entire purpose is thus slashed right out of sight. Contrarily to what people may believe, this film is just as culturally specific as most horror films, including the Australian effort Wolf Creek (2005), another film wrongly tagged as a parent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with which it shares only superficial aspects. By reducing the title only to Harpoon and thus shifting the focus away from the location of the action, which is crucial, toward its most impressive device of violence, which is incidental, the distributors are demeaning the entire horror genre and its power to transcend linguistic and geographical boundaries in order to deliver a heartfelt message to the world. They even become guilty of somewhat of a colonialist crime: cultural non-differentiation, which tends to defuse the central message of the work concerned, effectively forcing it to silence. The entire enterprise is thus pacified and assimilated into the smooth, unified façade of the horror section shelves. But if ever there was a genre that needed to make cultural distinctions obvious, it is precisely the horror genre. Horror is revelatory, it is visceral, and it pertains very specifically to the culture from which it comes. It lets you know exactly what people are feeling at any moment in time, showing you their fears, their frustrations and everything else that makes their heart beat. The rationale wherein you need to hide the foreign origin of any cultural product in order to better sell it only reinforces the philosophy of cultural assimilation. Moreover, it prevents any attempt to make the necessary steps toward the recognition of difference. Frankly, the melting pot is quite an inhumane concept when considering the irresistible (economic) power of the dominant culture responsible of the pot. The idea that the proximity of different cultures will eventually make them all melt into one unified entity will always amount to assimilation under the watchful eye of commerce and this is precisely what seems to be happening here. The truth is we should exalt difference instead of melting it: we should not force others to do things our way, but rather learn the way of others in order to better know them, and eventually accept them as they are. Humans should learn to bond through their common plight as humans, not as the undifferentiated parts of one global cultural entity or the antagonistic members of clashing cultures. In the film presently under analysis, we should try to understand what makes the killers tick. We should try and pinpoint their place within the culture from where they originated as well as the reason for their madness. Which is what we will try to do here, in an effort to give world cinema of any kind its right to difference.
Humans have replaced whales in Icelandic waters
As the title suggests, the film chronicles the ordeal of some tourists participating in a whale-watching excursion in Reykjavik. It opens in a bar where protagonist Annette and her airhead friend are spending the night prior to their excursion out to sea, an excursion in which Annette has only reluctantly agreed to embark. After meeting a suave stranger who buys them beer and proposes to introduce them to the house band, the two girls eventually split up. While Annette responsibly decides to get back to the hotel, her friend is rather dragged away by the suave stranger toward a shady looking apartment by the pier. At this point, we assume that the two friends have implicitly agreed to meet aboard the tour boat the following day. We then cut to the harbor at midday, where a flock of clueless tourists is gathering prior to the whale-watching expedition. We are first introduced to a trio of smutty Japanese bourgeois, a trio of bitter old feminists from the old countries, a charismatic black guy, a blonde bimbo, and a drunken, sharply-dressed Algerian (at least, that's what he appears to be trying to be). And although they thus amass, there is still no boat in sight. When said boat finally appears, with no other than Gunnar Hansen at the helm, we still haven't seen Annette approaching. The poor girl is still sleeping back at the hotel, blissfully unaware of her lateness. When brutally woken up by the housemaid, she rushes outside and sprints to the boat where she witnesses its departure. Hellbent on joining her friend, she leaps aboard, wounding her knee in the process but drawing applauses from the surrounding crowd. She has done it! The only problem is that her friend is nowhere in sight. On top of that, she now has a bleeding knee and this gives the pervy mate a golden opportunity to creep up on her and lovingly tend to her wounds. He takes this opportunity to propose an innocent trip down to the cabin where he then proceeds to rape her. But he won't have time to get to the panties as the captain of the ship is severely wounded in a freak accident caused by the drunken Algerian. Called on deck by the blonde bimbo, who manages only a cold stare toward half-naked, crying Annette, the mate rushes up. Seeing his captain dying, he flees aboard the rescue boat, leaving the tourists to fend for themselves. Unable to maneuver the ship, the eclectic group seems doomed to wave-rocking boredom. That is, until they are approached by a speedy dragger who's pilot proposes to "save" them in so many words. When the dragger approaches a rusty whaler and the tourists are taken on-board, much to the annoyance of the charismatic black leader, the slaughter begins. And it begins right away, with no less than a hammer to the face of one of the feminists. The family of hunters gathered for the massacre are but three: the authoritative old mother and her two sons: the demented, twitchy dwarf and the broad-shouldered, cutex-wearing strongman. They don't even look so tough, kind of nice actually. But the hammer to the face is too much for the hysteric tourists who chaotically disperse, smashing the main narrative to bits in an instant. The rest of the film is a formulaic cat-and-mouse game between the bad guys and good guys, the gritty realism coming in brutal contact with the need for a formulaic spectacle.
The film distinguishes itself very early on by boasting some of the best, most beautiful and relevant credits ever to grace a survivalist horror film. These credits are achieved by grafting together excerpts from old Icelandic whale-hunting films. As I watched the gorgeous Northern seas rippling with sun-streaked waves while swaying along with bearded fishermen on the wet bridge of a dragger, I was struck with sudden and utterly powerful nostalgia. Shivers ran through my spine as I felt the biting breeze prickle my flesh while the carelessness of olden days seem to lighten the burden weighting on my shoulders. The gritty immediacy of the images before my eyes reminded me of John Grierson's films and I thus felt a strong connection to the whale-hunters whose lives I thus had the privilege to share for a spell. My entire sympathy was instantly channeled toward these tough, toiling men from an era forever crystalized in history because I suddenly stood amongst them, enthralled as I was by the surprisingly gripping images in front of me. Of course, I was expecting the celluloid to tear at any moment and aggressive heavy metal to come blasting through my speakers, thus ruining my fun. But this thankfully never happened. Instead, I was treated to a spectacle far more impressive than any of the slaughter scenes contained post-credits. I saw whales dying at the hands of men. I saw their huge carcasses hauled to the pier, then sliced into thin strips using an instrument of rare sharpness. It was incredible: the flesh was peeling away like the skin of an orange. This was a sight I had never, ever seen, nor something I would have ever expected to see in a B-series exploitation film. What the credits did, at least for me, was to celebrate the olden days of whale-fishing, during which men were not mere men, but the rightful descendants of Viking heroes. They made whale-fishing to be something convivial and wholly natural. After all, hunting is natural. Only the fishing industry isn't. And that's what should be fixed. By implementing all-reaching legislation to ban whale-hunting, the green powers that be may well save a species from extinction, but they have also caused the extinction of another species, that of whale-hunters. And this is the main point that the film tries to get across, starting with the credits, whose purpose is to explain the nostalgia of the demented whale-hunters remembering a golden age during which they didn't have to hunt humans for meat and didn't have to carve wooden whales for uncaring tourists to try and earn a living. As I mentioned during my rant against cultural non-differentiation, all appraisal of horror films should be based on the analysis of the killer's nature, not on the analysis of the killer's violence. Here, the symbolism is explicit: we have a family of professional whale-hunters whose trade was dismantled by the pressures from "Green Piss" and other like-minded groups who failed to consider the full ramifications of their actions on local populations... of humans. We have a family who's patriarch is deceased (symbolizing the death of the old guard and the disorientation of the younger generation). Their sharp knives only allow them to scrape a living by carving wooden whales. Still, old habits die hard and the family's proficiency still lies squarely in hunting. So naturally they end up hunting what has replaced whales in the surrounding seas: whale watchers. One so bold could say that this illustrates a very natural form of evolution: one species replacing another within the hunting grounds of a predator is bound to become a foe to be killed. In effect, ecologists have thus completely unbalanced the Icelandic ecosystem in a bid to save it. By failing to acknowledge the predatory nature of humans, they have turned their own fellowmen into preys. This central irony is the greatest asset of Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre but sadly it is eventually drowned by the narrow needs of survivalist horror's rigid framework wherein one-liners are often equated with revelatory monologues and plot twists are likened to elaborate set-ups. Because when the massacre begins, we enter the very familiar territory of systematic stalk-and-slash and the protagonists lose their interest by becoming nothing but preys. As for the villains, they thus cannot escape the burden of overdetermination. Murderous families of cannibals like this one instantly become universal when depicted only through violence, onomatopoeias and non-sensical ramblings even though their "crimes" are specific to their condition. And just like that, every effort made toward characterization is rendered useless. With one fell swoop of the hammer, the film implodes and leaves us scratching our heads up until the very final shot.
An anchor into blood-splattered nostalgia
There's a reason why I described the opening credits at great length in the previous paragraph and this reason is quite simple: these opening credits are the best part of the film. I'm not saying the film is entirely bad, I'm just saying that the credits greatly overwhelmed the following hour and a half of film. And although I knew this would be the case right off the bat, I was nonetheless happy with Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre's gritty look and competent use of the hand-held camera to brush a realistic, intimate portrait of the characters and locations. By framing faces in uneasy proximity and thus capturing even their nastier features, the filmmakers earned points for honesty and thus made their characters to be entirely believable (despite some linguistic limitations). This immediately makes the two "German" "heroines" fleshier and more sympathetic than your usual perfect bimbos. It also makes the bar wherein the action starts to be depicted in an unusually sensual fashion that draws you right inside. Annette and her friend are nicely fleshed-out and their surroundings are vibrant. The only problem with the introductory scene is the apparent accumulation of clichés. Seeing how they ended up in a noisy bar abroad and how they don't seem to know a word of Icelandic, the two girls immediately appear to be the same dopey partyers which have plagued the genre for the most part of the last three decades, popping up as sacrificial lambs in other recent "touristic" horror films such as Hostel (2005), Turistas (2006), Donkey Punch (2008), finding their ultimate incarnation in The Human Centipede (2009). Then there's the dreadfully dated apparition of a suave stranger trying to befriend the girls, buying them beer and such. You will roll your eyes a lot at this point, thinking you've fallen prey to lowest common denominator horror. But the makers of this film are actually much smarter than this. In actuality, every apparent cliché is but a way to trick you by using genre formulas to better subvert them as the plot unfolds. Hence, the three characters introduced in the opening scene are revealed to be of a completely different nature than what we first thought. This is incredibly savvy stuff here. And the film remains just as smart up until a very specific point in the narrative: the point where the entire cast of characters disbands, transforming each individual into nothing more than an overdetermined victim to be summarily executed. In effect, they become nothing more than hunted-down whales, but without the majesty thereof. Obviously, you can argue that this is precisely the role they are given within the story, which is the case, but the net result in narrative terms is a fragmentation of the plot into a bunch of little, insignificant plot fragments. Each victim tries to save his own skin while carefully avoiding all others. Again, you could say that this attitude tells a lot about the selfishness of humanity. But you must also acknowledge the fact that this makes for really poor, really broken plot development. In the end, as the wit dries up and the subversions of the genre become more scarce and less biting (I'm thinking here about the central revelation concerning Leon), you end up focusing solely on the only really dramatic, poignant issue in the film, the martyrdom of Annette.
Poor Annette is one of the unluckiest of all horror film protagonists. I mean it. Her ordeal begins right off the bat as she is abandoned by her friend, who prefers the company of some dopey guy she has just met. And despite the fact that Annette insists that they must go to bed early for an expedition she hasn't even planned, her friend still sleeps in and ditches her. When she is woken up by the housemaid the following morning, Annette wraps a blanket around her naked body and erupts into the corridor, drawing the lascivious look of a passer-by. This might seem like an insignificant event at first, but it actually becomes an important leitmotiv as more and more perverts start ogling the fake-German beauty, further hurting and degrading her. After being nearly raped by the mate aboard the whale-watching ship, she is specifically targeted by the equally perverted, twitchy younger boy of the whale-hunting family who seems to wish her his bride. Upon catching her, the frankly annoying, dwarfish fellow immediately proceeds to use her in a weirdly religious rite involving the spreading of a thick, greasy substance akin to blood over her half-naked body. All through the plot, the poor girl is also mistreated by the other good guys: first by the blond bimbo who thinks her a bitch, turning her back when Annette outstretches her hand for help following the near-rape, then by a surprise caller who manages to reach her cell phone but categorically refuses to believe her story and hangs up. In the end, things get even shittier... Contrarily to what we were led to believe early on, Annette is not a heroine, but a sacrificial victim. It would seem that the focus put on her early on as well as the prodigious leap she makes to reach the whale-watching ship gives her a hero status de facto, granting her some immunity against impeding doom. But it does not. And it is in this subversion of the heroic persona that we find the dramatic crux of the film. Since the film is mostly devoid of both dramatic power and sympathetic victims, the tragic nature of Annette's character, which is constantly trapped by events beyond her will, is crucial to the film. It allows for (barely) sufficient dramatic intensity to propel the film up until the final frame and leave the viewer affected, and thus willing to reflect more deeply on the ensemble after the credits start rolling.
Poor Annette is the object of many perverted gazes
All in all, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre is a good, smart film that lacks the technical innovation to transcend the boring formula which fuels the most part of the narrative. It does an impressive job of setting up the story, but it goes nowhere from there but where you'd expect it to go only by looking at the cover art. It's a real shame because it showed a lot of potential going in. As for culturally-specific elements, they can only go so far to distinguish a film that has so willfully chosen the beaten paths of survivalist horror. Thankfully, we got Annette to carry us through to a surprisingly affective ending.
2,5/5 A smartly ironic, involving film that falls flat on its face when giving in to the ridiculous formula of survivalist horror
