Reviews
Killer Whale
The unexpectedly hot start to January 2026 has been a welcome surprise, especially given that January horror releases tend to be lacking in quality, to put it politely. Unfortunately, that hot streak comes crashing down in acrimonious and spectacular fashion with Killer Whale, an unwelcome return to the January norm of poor quality horror with almost no redeeming features. It now makes perfect sense why the film has been denied a proper wide theatrical release, instead being quietly shuffled into a day and date home rental, where it can fail with considerably less public embarrassment.
At this point, it has become a rite of passage and almost a yearly tradition for me to seek out my first dreadful movie of the year. From the opening scene, which features choppy editing in which a worker at a Thailand orca zoo seemingly teleports from the side of a pool to what looks like the middle of the ocean, where she is hunted by Ceto, the orca and supposed star of the film, I knew I was in for a treat with Killer Whale. Credit where it is due, it did not disappoint and even managed to surpass some expectations in just how low it sinks. Filled to the brim with egregious uses of shoddy green screen and some of the most unconvincing entry level special effects imaginable, Jo Anne Brechin’s Killer Whale truly needs to be seen to be believed.
Admittedly, when Killer Whale opens with not one but two deaths within the first few minutes, I thought there might be some potential for the film to at least fall into the category of fun bad, despite everything mentioned above. However, once the film abruptly jumps twelve months into the future and begins following best friends Maddie (Virginia Gardner) and Trish (Mel Jarnson) as they holiday on the Thai islands where Ceto is housed, it quickly descends into an incredibly generic creature feature. Unlike its competition, though, it completely lacks any real stakes or emotional investment in its bland leads.
The girls, alongside Josh (Mitchell Hope) and clearly positioned as the first expendable character given even a handful of lines, take a trip to what should be a beautiful lagoon, if not for the fact it so obviously appears to have been filmed in a studio. This occurs just hours after they sneak into the zoo and witness Ceto brutally murdering a helpless janitor. Now, I do not know about you, but if I had seen that happen in front of me, I would be a shell of a human being, not hell bent on continuing my holiday plans, but I digress. Even more baffling is the fact that the zoo somehow releases the murderous Ceto into the same lagoon without anyone batting an eyelid, a narrative leap that Brechin, alongside fellow writer Katharine McPhee, must have hoped audiences would be silly enough to overlook.
After the inevitable whale fodder in Josh is presumably eaten by Ceto, although it is genuinely hard to make out due to the catastrophically bad visuals on display, we’re talking the same level as Amazon Prime’s War of the Worlds from 2025, the surviving girls make their way to a cluster of nearby rocks. It is at this point that the film essentially grinds to a halt, reducing itself to a survival scenario focused entirely on the two friends. This could have worked, had the filmmakers managed to give the characters even a semblance of personality or relatability. Instead, they remain generic, bland, and quite frankly annoying, leaving me unable to care in the slightest whether they survived.
There is little of interest in the second half of the movie, with most of the runtime spent simply following the girls. Again, premise wise this is not necessarily a bad idea, but the fact they somehow survive the blazing Thailand sun and heat without food and barely any water, all while showing no real physical effects, is baffling. The characters never truly appear desperate or as though they are in immediate danger, despite their complete lack of resources and the killer whale remaining only metres away at all times, which is honestly wild.
It would be easy to lay all of the blame at the feet of the script, which is admittedly terrible, but strong performances can elevate even the worst material, if only by a small margin. Unfortunately, Virginia Gardner and Mel Jarnson are never in any danger of doing that here, delivering what are likely two of the worst performances you will see all year. That is particularly worrying in Jarnson’s case, given that she is set to star in this year’s Street Fighter movie, a film I am genuinely excited for and hopeful she can rise to the occasion. Based on this showing, however, I am far from convinced.
There was a genuine opportunity here to create a compelling horror movie with meaningful commentary on the captivity of such magnificent creatures. Yet when presented with the most interesting element of the film, it is barely explored at all. Instead, the focus remains on human characters so bland and forgettable that I had to look up their names again while writing this review. Quite frankly, I wish Ceto had got his work done early and turned this into a short film I could have rooted for the orca in.
