GORE IN THE STORE
REVIEWS BY FANS FOR FANS
5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH

Beyond The Rave
Hunter Prey
7th Dimension
Army of the Dead
Splintered
Basement
Meat Grinder
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The Blackout
The Torment
The Torment
(Second Opinion)
Hierro
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
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Resurrecting
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The Haunting Of
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Soul Eater: Part One
Rozen Maiden:
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Bikini Girls On Ice
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Satan's Baby Doll
Feast 111
Phobia
A Lizzard in a Woman's Skin
Valhalla Rising
City of the Living Dead
Dorothy
Daybreakers
Daybreakers
(Second Opinion)
Harpoon: The Reykjavik Whale
Watching Massacre
Harpoon:The Reykjavik Whale
Watching Massacre
(Second Opinion)
Feast 3:The Happy Finnish
Raging Phoenix
His Name Was Jason
Left Bank
Ju-On: White Ghost/White Ghost
Spiral
Ghost Machine
Stag Night
Bitch Slap
The Descent 2
The Descent 2-Second opinion
Dance of The Dead
Henry Lee Lucas: Serial Killer
House Of The Devil
The Twilight Saga
New Moon
Salvage
Salvage-Second opinion
Dread
The Haunted World of
El Superbeasto
Saw VI
The Horseman
Triangle-Second opinion
Triangle
Cabin Fever 2-Third opinion
Cabin Fever 2-Second opinion
Cabin Fever 2
Stan Helsing
Pandorum
Pandorum-Second opinion
Open Graves
Paranormal Activity
Growth
Growth-Second opinion
Train
Antichrist
Wrong Turn 3
Coffin Rock
Orphan
Sorority Row
Drag Me to Hell
Staunton Hill
Summer Moon
Driftwood
Messengers 2

 

Directed by Júlíus Kemp. Starring Gunnar Hansen, Pihla Viitala, Nae, Terence Anderson, Miranda Hennessy, Aymen Hamdouchi, Carlos Takeshi, Miwa Yanagizaw. Horror, Iceland, 90 min.

DVD release date 10th May 2010 - £12.99.

Riding the Eyjafallajokull ash cloud from Iceland to UK DVD comes Harpoon: The Reykjavik Wale Watching Massacre, billed as the island’s first horror film - well I can’t think of any others, can you?

A group of tourists gather on a dock in Reykjavik awaiting the late arrival of a whale watching tour boat. There’s a Japanese couple and their assistant, an African American with a dodgy accent, a blond woman honeymooning alone after the death of her fiancé, a drunken French Lothario, a group of sneering middle-aged Icelandic women, and a hapless girl abandoned after her travel mate elects to skip the sea trip to be a groupie for a terrible Icelandic industrial metal band (a wise decision as it surprisingly turns out).

This group of racial and national stereotypes (the French guy actually says “oh la la” in one tense scene) eventually sets sail only for the deckhand to attempt to rape one of the tourists and a nasty accident to befall the captain. The deckhand exits with the only life raft leaving the group stranded on the ocean. After some bickering they are rescued by a passing fisherman, alas he takes them not to a safe harbour but instead to the rusting hulk of a whaling ship populated by a band of cannibals. What are the chances, eh?

Obviously hi-jinks ensue.

Harpoon uses a tried and tested genre recipe, take one group of disparate characters, make sure they hate each other, place in an isolated setting, sprinkle liberally with inbred cannibal fiends and bake for 90 minutes, making sure to serve with plenty of red sauce. As the presence of original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen, and the subtitle of the film attest, Harpoon is loosely modelled on Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is a comparison that does Harpoon no favours at all, as it is inferior to its source on every conceivable level.

It feels not unlike shooting Minke whales with a gas powered harpoon to compare this film to TCM, but what they hell, they asked for it. A triumph of Hooper’s film is to introduce a group of really rather odious young people and make the audience root for them, not because they feel any great warmth towards the characters, but because the alternative is to side with the family, and that is simply unthinkable. Harpoon tries to do the same trick, but its smorgasbord (yeah I know I’ve gone Swedish now, blow me) of victims are so utterly repellent and uninteresting as to make the audience practically bay for their blood from about the fifth minute of the film. Well you will be baying for some time matey because despite a brief runtime it takes an age for the good ship harpoon to get to cruising speed and the narrative hull is riddled with storytelling non sequiturs that go absolutely nowhere.

What is this film trying to be? Comedy? Well it’s not funny. Horror? Well it’s not scary. Gross out? Not that either, as it insists on continually cutting away from the violence at key points.

A thick seam of rather ugly misogyny rears its head as well. The attempted rape is not enough, the same character has to later by hung from the ceiling, stripped and covered in fish guts by one the cannibal family. Interestingly during this scene a humpbacked lunatic keeps ranting about how the girl is an offering to the fuehrer. This might lead you to think there is going to be a rip-off of the classic grandpa-has-a-hammer scene from TCM. Let me save you the trouble of looking forward to this, no fuehrer ever appears.

Basically the film is a complete mess, tonally all over the place, badly paced, mediocre to terrible acting, no suspense and rubbish kills. And what happened with the title? Harpoon is a late addition for the DVD release, so what happened there? Well maybe someone in marketing got cold feet when they realised they had a jokey title and a film with no laughs.

Give it a wide berth.

Stuart Barr

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