My late-night double-feature featured two new horror movies that, thematically, didn’t pair well together. Well, apart from them being of the same genre and having copious amounts of despair. Even still, The Confession and Killer Whale couldn’t be further apart, in terms of plot. The former sees a mother learning a dark family secret (or so she thinks); the latter finds two friends trapped in a cove with a predatory orca.
I’m starting off with Will Canon’s The Confession, which premiered at UK FrightFest London last year, because “C” comes before “K” in the alphabet. There’s also a bit of partiality, seeing as how The Confession was a more intriguing movie. Here, Italia Ricci is a musician and mother, and she’s writing her next album in her childhood home. About a hundred miles south of Dallas, Texas, inside her late father’s house, the Ricci character then discovers a recorded confession; her dad admitted to murdering someone.
What easily could have been another drop in the bucket of cold case/true crime thrillers nowadays eventually evolved into something less grounded. More curious. The characters’ discovery and piecing-together of clues, if you can call such well-planted breadcrumbs that, give this a standard procedural quality that should be widely appealing; yet it’s the culmination of everything that left me conflicted. On the one hand, drawing from old European legends is so hard to resist. On the other, this movie gets bogged down by its own tropey beginnings and so-so follow-through that the ending, which is admittedly what made The Confession a bit worthwhile, almost doesn’t feel deserved.
As for Jo-Anne Brechin‘s Killer Whale, quite often I wondered if this movie was even written by a flesh-and-blood person. It is unbearably generic in every single way. From the setup to the characters, this slab of creature horror is just The Shallows (2016), but now with an orca. Adding injury to insult, the script and aesthetic come off like something puked out by gen-AI.
Killer Whale isn’t the first of its kind; Michael Anderson delivered the best Jaws rip-off, Orca, back in 1977. So although Brechin’s movie doesn’t get points for originality, that’s not because she, too, sics an orca on unsuspecting swimmers. No, no, Killer Whale simply does nothing that hasn’t been done before. The slew of shark movies from the last decade, thanks to a resurgence after 47 Meters Down and its sequel, have also thought to strand young people somewhere with a deadly sea predator. Before I get a weird comment about this, keep in mind I’m not one to vouch for wholly original filmmaking; a lot of my favorites were inspired by another story. Truly, though, what elevates those movies is the additional ingredients added to the recipe. If you’re gonna borrow from someone else’s work, then please have the guts to go bigger. Preferably better.
Sooner or later, we must move on to other big, possibly dangerous animals in these aquatic horror movies. Especially if the writers can’t ever seem to leave behind the same hackneyed prompts of yesteryear. Am I exaggerating? Well, tell me if this sounds at all familiar: here, someone (Virginia Gardner) is grieving a loved one’s death, and then that someone’s best friend (Mel Jarnson) plans a healing trip for the two of them, all before delivering a twisty revelation that only adds to their bizarre dilemma. Sure, the two leads are capable performers, but alas, it’s not their acting that drowns this movie. Even halfway decent CGI for the orca can’t make up for a plethora of highly telegraphed moments, wooden dialogue, and questionable production values.
I would recommend neither of these two movies to anyone looking for a good time. The Confession had the most potential, which is why its outcome is more disappointing. Killer Whale’s trailer made it obvious what was washing ashore, and quite honestly, it should have stayed out to sea, never to be seen or heard from again.
Tales from the Paulside 
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