Piranha (1978)

½ star
Everyone has to start somewhere. For Joe Dante and John Sayles, Piranha gave the young filmmakers the opportunity to work on their craft in a throwaway horror movie, allowing them to get their foot in the door before moving on to better things—much better things like Gremlins and Limbo. Ditto for special effects legends Phil Tippett and Rob Bottin, who supplied the stop-motion animation and gory makeup here before showcasing their talent in Robocop and Starship Troopers. Those titles came later. For now, we have to deal with this mess. Piranha is dreadful, with bad dialogue, questionable decision-making and insane plotting. Only the climactic gorefest brings any suspense to the story. Beyond that, this is a disaster.

Two lovers go on a hike and break into a testing facility and swim in the pool, where something under the water devours them both. Later, we meet Maggie (Heather Menzies), a skip tracer hired to track down the missing hikers. She meets alcoholic Paul (Bradford Dillman) in a secluded cabin and twists his arm to take her to the supposedly abandoned facility to track their whereabouts. With little motivation or regard for safety, Maggie activates a switch to drain the pool to see if the hikers’ bodies are in there. At this point she doesn’t know about the deadly fish, but that’s irrelevant. Breaking into a facility and pulling levers is stupid no matter how you slice it. Weirdo scientist Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) enters too late and warns of the dangers to come.

The pool was holding mutated piranhas, leftovers from a Vietnam-era plan (Operation: Razorteeth) to dump the fish into North Vietnamese rivers to attack the enemy. These piranhas are more robust than the natural variety, able to survive in salt water and lower temperatures. They also have a ravenous appetite. By releasing them into the local river system, Maggie sent them on their way to a children’s summer camp and eventually a resort where the organizer (Dante mainstay Dick Miller) is a pale copy of the mayor in Jaws, ignoring warnings of the threat headed his way. Maggie and Paul take a raft downriver to stop the dam from its periodic outflow, which could prevent the school of fish from reaching the camp and resort. Along the way there’s a generic army colonel and evil scientist played by Bruce Gordon and Barbara Steele, respectively, who want to coverup the threat and detain Maggie and Paul.

This all sounds simple enough, but John Sayles would have been in his mid-20s when he wrote this, and his naiveté shows. For example, Maggie and Paul encounter a fisherman whose legs have been eaten to the bone. He managed to crawl away from the shore before bleeding out. Rather than alert the authorities, Paul opts to bury the guy on his property, which is not only a waste of time but a move that completely disregards legal necessities like an autopsy or police investigation. Later, Paul meets with the evil scientist Dr. Mengers and warns that the piranha could use a small stream to get around the dammed lake. The doctor concludes that the fish aren’t smart enough to use the stream. Since she doesn’t want news of the mutated piranha to get out, she and the colonel lock him up with Maggie, an illogical move since it is in their best interest to consider all possible ways to prevent the spread of the fish downstream.

More insanity ensues. The fish do indeed make it to the summer camp, where Paul’s daughter is staying. The fish attack the swimmers, mostly children, and curiously the piranhas are not shown to be aggressive enough to pull them under. Most of the kids escape. I get it. I know why Joe Dante did this. He didn’t want to show the mass killing of children. That’s fine, but then he and Sayles should have come up with a way to save the children while remaining true to how the piranhas had been presented to us thus far. The adult victims up to this point were completely overwhelmed and dragged underwater in seconds. In fact, after the piranhas leave the camp, they make it to the resort, where the able-bodied adults are no match.

Piranha is poorly executed and exists more as a steppingstone for its talent behind the camera than as a solid horror movie. Joe Dante gives us some early looks at a style that would later become his calling card, like featuring cartoon characters (playing on a television screen) and casting cult icons like McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000). Other than spotting these signature inserts, there is little reason to see this.

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