Review: Piranha (1978)

Heather Menzies is looking for missing youngsters in Lost River Lake and requests the aid of surly boozer local Bradford Dillman. They find an army test site and the backpacks of the two missing teens near some murky water. They decide to drain it, thinking the kids’ bodies might be there. Crazy scientist Kevin McCarthy turns up to tell them they done fucked up. You see, there was a secret Government experiment way back when that saw genetically-mutated piranha created and intended to be used in the waters of North Vietnam during the war, to gain an advantage on the enemy! Much to McCarthy’s annoyance, the war was soon won and the experiments not needed anymore, so they were stopped. And now Dillman and Menzies have unwittingly released these deadly piranha from the pond and out into the open river. With a resort to be opened and a summer camp for kids nearby, this is a very, very big problem. Not that greedy Texan resort owner Dick Miller or arsehole camp director Paul Bartel will hear of it. Barbara Steele plays an ominous government scientist who turns up, Keenan Wynn plays Dillman’s drinking buddy, future soap star Melody Thomas (Scott) plays a spankable camp counsellor, as does Belinda Balaski (less spankable, though in my opinion).

 

Less a spoof of “Jaws” as often reported than a low-budget rip-off from Executive Producer and noted penny-pincher Roger Corman, this 1978 film, the sophomore effort from Joe Dante (“Gremlins”, “The Howling”, “Innerspace”), is easily the best of the post-“Jaws” films. It’s not even close. Scripted by John Sayles (“Battle Beyond the Stars”, “The Howling”) from a story by Sayles and Richard Robinson (“Kingdom of the Spiders”), it’s especially fun for film buffs, like most of Dante’s films. And unlike Mr. Spielberg, Dante gives us full-frontal female nudity in the opening scene. I bet Corman (who essentially ripped this one off too, a couple of years later with “Humanoids From the Deep”!) demanded that one himself, bless his heart.

 

I was especially taken with how the water in this one looked. It looked dirty and swampy as is appropriate, yet it somehow looked beautiful. It takes a talented cinematographer to pull that off, I think. Corman (a genuinely savvy guy) may be a B-producer but he usually churned out quality B product, and Dante sure isn’t a hack director, either. He’s certainly a smart enough director to shoot the attack scenes up close to hide the FX (Which are apparently rubber puppets on sticks being thrashed around!). He also creates one helluva chaotic, bloody finale. There’s not as much humour as everyone seems to think, though the “Jaws” computer game was a nice touch. It looks almost as good as the “E.T.” computer game (A little gamer nerd comedy for you).

 

Bradford Dillman isn’t my favourite actor, but he’s an interesting choice for the lead. He has a kind of irritable Bruce Dern quality to him, rather than just trying to be a poor man’s Roy Scheider. Long-serving character actor Keenan Wynn, meanwhile, doesn’t get much screen time but plays perhaps the most likeable character of his career. His performance in his final scene is amusing, and clearly not his finest hour as an actor. The standout, however, is easily Kevin McCarthy, who is cast to perfection. His initial, crazed appearance and rantings are a brilliant in-joke referencing his role in 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (a role he also seemed to reprise in an excellent cameo in Philip Kaufman’s highly underrated remake from 1978), probably the comic high point of the film. The speech he has where he talks about how the piranha were experiments to fuck with the Viet Cong during the war is hilariously absurd. The closest this thing has to genuine parody of “Jaws”, though, is in the way over-the-top amount of blood in the film. Priceless stuff from the Corman school of exploitation filmmaking, but if you want to think of this as a parody, that’s the only element in which I can see real evidence of it. One-scene veteran Dick Miller gets the funniest line in the whole film, however: ‘I swear to you on my honour as a Texan!’. Playing the Murray Hamilton role from “Jaws”, the line is hilarious because although he tries his best to put on an accent, Dick Miller and ‘Texan’ do not remotely belong in the same sentence.

 

Although she’s perfectly cast, I do think Dante probably should’ve gotten more out of ‘Scream Queen’ Barbara Steele as a military scientist. She’s excellent and beautiful in that sexy-yet-demonic kinda way, but really doesn’t end up playing that much of a role. Cult filmmaker Paul Bartel sure does play a perfectly creepy, jerk camp director, though. Points off for Steele and McCarthy pronouncing ‘piranha’ in the most bizarre and just plain incorrect manner: ‘pir-ahn-ya’? Really? Who the hell pronounces it like that? No one, outside of this film. The music score by Pino Donaggio (“Don’t Look Now”, “Dressed to Kill”, “Blow Out”) is wildly eclectic and uneven. When he’s aping John Williams and Bernard Herrmann, it’s really quite effective. But the electronic shit? Cheapo stuff and not appropriate at all.

 

I don’t think it’s quite Dante’s best film (I’d place “The Howling” and “Gremlins” ahead), but from a directorial and cinematography point-of-view, it’s certainly very impressive for what was clearly intended to be tongue-in-cheek schlock. It’s as if Dante took this film as his chance to show what he could do from a visual standpoint, ably backed up by cinematographer Jamie Anderson (Dante’s debut, “Hollywood Boulevard”, “Unlawful Entry”, “The Juror”) and stunning choice of locations. A lot of fun so long as you can appreciate this kind of thing. I’m not sure that speedboat stunt near the end was necessary, though, that seemed tacked-on by request of the producer to me.

 

Rating: B