Dallas Film Now.

Virginia Gardner and Mel Jarnson star in director Jo-Anne Brechin’s thriller. 

The opening moments set an excellent tone of terror. The titular creature, Ceto, is introduced in captivity. Having recently lost her calf in birth, she is in a mood, so to speak, and a hapless animal trainer pays the price in blood. 

The movie then shifts gears as Virginia Gardner, who is the brightest, most cheerful screen presence of her generation, enters as Maddie. In her opening scene, however, tragedy strikes when her beloved boyfriend is killed by an armed and rather stupid intruder; I mean, who brings a shotgun to rob a fast-food restaurant at closing time? 

One year later, still nursing her grief, as well as her partial loss of hearing, Maddie is struggling to move on. Her BFF Trish (Mel Jarnson), who’s made a few bucks from her large following on social media, arrives to take Maddie away on a trip they’ve always dreamed of, to a seaside locale in Thailand, where they can rest, recuperate, and maybe meet a couple of cute boys. 

What Maddie doesn’t know is that Trish also plans for her to “meet” Ceto, her favorite animal in the world, who has been exiled to a water park in Thailand because of her actions in the movie’s opening scene. One drunken night later, Trish, by far the most outgoing of the two, has picked up a cute boy, Josh (Mitchell Hope), who takes them to a remote cove that has yet to be discovered by tourists, though I must have missed the movie’s explanation for why locals don’t visit the gorgeous locale, surrounded by protective rocks, and far from prying eyes. 

What Maddie and Trish don’t know is that Ceto has again taken vengeance on a hapless human and has been exiled, somehow, to the cove. The script, credited to Katharine McPhee and director Jo-Anne Brechin, neglects to explain how that happened, so let’s just chalk it up to the exigencies of the contrived premise. 

In essence, of course, the movie borrows its premise — a woman in isolated terror battling a shark — wholesale from Jaume Collett-Serra’s The Shallows (2016), written by Anthony Jaswinski, and mixes it with Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down (2017), in which two sisters with ‘issues’ are trapped in a shark cage. 

Here, frankly, the limitations of this movie’s budget can be glaring, to the point that it’s vividly obvious that the actors are not in the same scene as Ceto or her digital representation. Nonetheless, taken on its own terms, Killer Whale is a great movie for a lazy afternoon, primarily because Virginia Gardner and Mel Jarnson really sell their characters. 

Pumped full of foreboding by director Jo-Anne Brechin, as well as menacing music by composer Angela Little, Killer Whale functions quite well as an entertaining b-movie that has thrown logic out the door. The movie eventually acknowledges that killer whales — or, more properly identified, orcas — only rarely have ever attacked humans, except occasionally in captivity; the justification given here stems from Ceto “suspecting” that humans are why her calf died. Or was murdered — cue minor chords on the soundtrack. 

Even so, Maddie and Trish have a believable, longtime friendship that faces additional hurdles during the movie, both in the present and also resurfacing from the past. Yet, despite some risibly ridiculous moments and a stretch too far, Virginia Gardner and Mel Jarnson kept me involved and rooting for them to survive, somehow, against all odds.  

The film opens Friday, January 16, in theaters, On Demand and On Digital.