Harpoon: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre   Starring: Gunnar Hansen E1 Entertainment RRP: £12.99 E1E51389 Certificate: 18 Available 10 May 2010

A diverse group of tourists are taken on a whale watching boat trip out of Reykjavik. When a bizarre accident kills the captain (who is played by none other than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen), and the only other crewmember takes the lifeboat and flees after attempting to rape one of the passengers, the holidaymakers are left on a floundering boat. They are relieved and encouraged when a whaling boat arrives to rescue them. However, the family of misfits aboard have had their way of life destroyed by the ban on whaling, and have taken instead to finding new prey. Human prey...

This is an Iceland, UK and Finland co-production, directed by Julius Kemp and scripted by novelist Sjon Sigurdsson. It badly wants to be The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a whaling boat, and partly succeeds in its own way - just without the shock factor and intensity of the classic. I found the characters to be a little clichéd: there is a self-centred Japanese man who mistreats his young wife (but turns out to be made of sterner stuff), two young women, one of whom is feisty, the other weak, a permanently drunk Frenchman, and a black man who immediately takes to being their protector as though this sort of thing happens to him every day. The family on the whaler are a copycat of the imbreds of TTCM particularly, with loose connections with The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn, only without the mutant features.

Horror films set on boats have become fashionable lately, with the excellent Triangle, the remake of Ghost Ship and others. It is, I suspect, the feeling of being confined to a relatively small area with nowhere to run to. When I  was watching the film it felt like just another heartless Ten Little Indians-type slasher movie, but surprisingly, looking back on it in retrospect it has raised itself in status within my mind. I can appreciate what was attempted here and, although there is nothing on show but a very basic plot, it works just as well as a suspense thriller because only the manner in which the victims are dispatched cause this to step across the line into horror territory.

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Ty Power