Orca (1977) on Netflix
Captain Nolan, an Irish Canadian fisherman in Newfoundland, hunts orcas to clear the debt on his boat. When his harpoon strikes a pregnant female, her mate comes after him.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb5.8/1015,160 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes9%
Trailer
Plot summary
Captain Nolan's crew is after a great white shark for a local aquarium when the shark turns on the aquarium's representative, Ken, and an orca kills it and saves him. Nolan, an Irish Canadian fisherman in Newfoundland who catches marine animals to cover the mortgage on his vessel Bumpo, sees more value in the orca and goes after it, but his harpoon strikes a pregnant female. Hauled aboard, she miscarries while her mate watches, and the male rams boats and tears open oil pipes, driving the village's fish away. Cetologist Rachel Bedford shows Nolan how much orcas resemble people, and he admits a drunk driver killed his wife and their unborn child. With Bedford, Ken and Umilak, a Mi'kmaq hunter, he sets out to face the whale.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Orca (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Luciano Vincenzoni was called by Dino de Laurentiis in the middle of the night in 1975 and, on admitting that he had watched Jaws, was instructed to "find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white".
- The main orcas used for filming, Yaka and Nepo, were trained animals from Marineland of the Pacific and Marine World/Africa USA, and the artificial rubber whales used alongside them were so lifelike that animal rights activists blocked the trucks transporting them.
- Vincenzoni said Richard Harris began drinking heavily on set after seeing a tabloid photograph of his wife Ann Turkel on a beach with a younger man; the 46-year-old Harris also insisted on performing his own stunts in the polar sequences and was nearly killed several times.
- The scenery meant to represent a remote polar region of Labrador was not shot there at all: it was fabricated in Malta by designer Mario Garbuglia.
- Because neither Vincenzoni nor his co-writer Sergio Donati were native English speakers, Robert Towne was hired as an uncredited script doctor to touch up the dialogue.
