PIRANHA (1978)
Starring Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies
Dante, the man who blessed horror film history with "The Howling," impressed Steven Spielberg with this fun rip-off of Spielberg's "Jaws." He so impressed the "E.T." director, in fact, that he was invited to helm "Gremlins," and his career hasn't been the same since.
This film is basically a spoof of every nature-runs-amok movie imaginable and boasts a large cast of B-movie talent, including Barbara Steele ("Shivers"), Dick Miller and Paul Bartel, among others. 1950s "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" star Kevin McCarthy plays a burned out government scientist who is taking care of a school of mutant piranha fish in a discarded military complex.
When a woman (Menzies)
investigating two missing teens (both of whom had been eaten by the piranha in
the film's opening minutes) accidentally unleashes the school into a nearby
river, all hell breaks loose. She hooks up with Dillman, who plays a drunken
divorcee, to save the kids of a nearby camp on the lake. It just so happens that
Dillman's daughter is one of the kids at the camp.
The movie far from takes itself seriously. Even after learning that the river is populated by armies of piranha, Dillman and Menzies still decide to travel down it on a makeshift raft. In the best scene of the movie, they watch with horror as the fish chew away at the rope holding the raft together.
The film plays mostly for laughs and isn't all that scary. Paul Bartel is funny as the camp's hyper-anal retentive head counselor. It's great to see and hear Steele in a role too. Normally, she's dubbed in every film she makes.
A sequel resulted.