Piranha

U.S.A. / 1978 Directed by Joe Dante Starring Bradford Dillman Heather Menzies Barbara Steele Color / 92 Minutes / R Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC) New Concorde Video

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"Lost River Lake. Terror... horror... death. Film at eleven." TV reporter at the scene

		Review by Brian Lindsey

6     6   10 = Highest Rating

In the wake of Spielberg's Jaws, the latter half of the '70s saw a slew of B-grade imitators invade theaters, most of them cranked out in the U.S. and Italy. Piranha, executive produced by Roger Corman and directed by Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins), is the best of these rip-offs. Dante was a young editor for Corman's New World Pictures when tapped to helm the picture. Without much money or time he crafted a taut little drive-in thriller ably reinforced with a cast of TV and B-movie regulars. A decent script (after John Sayles' rewrite), serving up ample shocks while winking at the absurdity of it all, certainly helped.     Heather Menzies (Ssssss) stars as Maggie McKeown, a plucky private investigator searching for two teens, a boy and girl, who disappeared while on a hiking trip. With the reluctant aid of divorced, hard drinkin' mountain man Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman), the trail leads to a abandoned Army research facility which was once a fish hatchery. (Shouldn't the Navy have been running it then?) Maggie and Paul find the missing kids' backpacks near a large holding tank filled with murky water. She decides to drain it to see if the teens drowned, their bodies possibly hidden on the bottom. The moment she throws the control switch that regulates the water level she and Paul are jumped by a wild-eyed man (Kevin McCarthy) screaming at them to stop. The pair eventually subdue their attacker and the deed is done: the water in the tank is drained into a nearby river. This proves to be a major screw-up on Maggie's part, and I mean major. With the crazed man out of action, Paul and Maggie check out the bottom of the tank. They find some jewelry, which Maggie identifies as belonging to the missing girl, along with bits and pieces of skeletons. (Not a good sign, y'all. Of course, we already know from the pre-titles sequence that the kids have long since become fish excreta.) Maggie decides it's time to get local authorities involved but the crazy man escapes and steals her jeep, tearing off down the mountainside. He wrecks it, leaving Paul and Maggie stranded with him at the research site. Now more coherent, the man explains that he is Dr. Hoak, a civilian research scientist for the government. He'd been working on breeding a new subspecies of vicious, genetically-enhanced piranha fish, able to survive in different environments, before the Army shut the lab down. They were to be used in the war effort in Vietnam, loosing them in Communist-controlled waterways. (Huh???) At war's end the secret project was discontinued, the test site abandoned, but Hoak continued the work on his own. By draining the holding tank Maggie has released a school of the mutant piranha into the river. A popular recreation site lies directly downstream, where Paul's daughter is attending summer camp with a horde of other brats. Frantically Paul, Maggie and Houk travel downriver on a raft to warn the unsuspecting innocents.     Peppered with a number of sly "in-joke" film references, Piranha is silly, unpretentious fun. Lots of little kids get bloodily chomped on, something that would never be permitted in an American movie today. Dante and company, fully conscious that it's nothing more than a bargain basement rip-off of Jaws for the drive-in circuit, don't use lowered expectations as an excuse — this is well-crafted schlock packed with thrills and laughs. Aside from Dillman (Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Treasure of the Amazon) and McCarthy (riffing on his Invasion of the Body Snatchers role), other familiar faces include perpetual "old coot" Keenen Wynn, who gets his legs gnawed off; Richard Deacon in a cameo as Maggie's boss; Paul Bartel, playing the asshole camp director; Corman regular Dick Miller as a ruthless, amoral watersports park owner; and Black Sunday's Barbara Steele as Dr. Menger, sinister former colleague of Houk's. The only really unforgiveably dumb moment in the flick is when villainous army officer Col. Flaxman (Bruce Gordon) oh so conveniently falls into the lake to get eaten. Why didn't they just have someone push him in?

Piranha gets a surprisingly nice treatment for the DVD release. The movie is presented fullframe but that's how it was shot. (In other words, you're not missing out on anything.) Picture quality is more than adequate, if not pristinely restored; ditto for the audio. Where the disc really shines is in the Extras: there's some home movie footage, shot during filming, narrated by director Dante and producer Jon Davison; the original trailer for Piranha as well as other Corman flicks (Humanoids from the Deep, Big Bad Mama, and Death Race 2000 among them); biographies of Dante, Corman, Davison, Sayles and the principal cast; a funny blooper reel of outtakes; and an amusing audio commentary featuring Dante and Davison (though they lapse into long stretches of silence every now and then). Oh yeah, the animated menu screens are cute. (Note: This is an altogether decent disc, but I had to knock the DVD rating down a notch for false advertising. The packaging claims that the disc also comes with a "reproduction of original Theatrical Marketing Guide" and a bonus booklet about Roger Corman. No such elements were included.) 11/03/01

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