In the rural area of Lost Lake, skip tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is tasked with locating two missing teenagers in the area and enlists the reluctant help of alcoholic single father Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) who maintains a curmudgeonly existence in the woods after his wife left him. The two come across a bizarre enclosure with a research pool and drain it looking for human remains leading to a brief fight with Dr. Robert Hoak. Eventually it's revealed the enclosure housed a mutated species of Piranha developed as a weapon for the U. S. Government and with the fish now in the river they must try and stop their advancement including towards the Summer camp where Paul's daughter, Suzie (Shannon Collins), is staying.
Piranha is a 1978 darkly comic horror film from screenwriter John Sayles and director Joe Dante who makes his solo debut having previously served as co-director alongside Allan Arkush on Hollywood Boulevard. Made for a modest $700,000 (with producer Roger Corman having cut the budget a few days prior to filming), very little was expected of the film as the crew were left mostly on their own while making something to cash-in on Jaws' success while Corman was busy producing Avalanche which was his belated entry into the Disaster movie wave of the 70s. The film became something of a sleeper for New World not only outgrossing the much bigger budgeted Avalanche, but also became New World's highest grossing film since its inception and helped launch the careers of Joe Dante and John Sayles, and Steven Spielberg called it the best of the Jaws knock-offs. Critical reception at the time was mixed with some cautiously embracing the film's tongue-in-cheek exploitative style, while with others it was dismissed as a quickie Jaws rip-off including from Siskel and Ebert. While Dante's style is very much in its early stages, Piranha shows a solid foundation for what we'd come to expect from Dante's later work.
While the movie's plot is pretty standard B-movie material with science gone horribly wrong and unleashed upon unsuspecting denizens, the screenplay by Sayles and the direction by Dante offer enough in terms of amusing characterization and wry humor intermixed with the more exploitative elements with plenty of blood and some not unwelcome shots of breasts per the standards of Corman's production approach. While the Piranha effects aren't anything too outstanding, they're nonetheless done to a successful degree giving the time and budget that was worked with that featured early work from effects mainstays like Chris Walas and Phil Tippett (including some of Tippett's stop-motion work). I will say that I'm quite surprised that the first major "feeding frenzy" sequence involves a bunch of kids at Summer camp which I'm of two minds with: On the one hand it's a bold and daring move that you wouldn't see a larger studio take, but on the other hand the acting by the kids is pretty good and they're not unlikable so it feels somewhat more at odds with the humorous parts (though your mileage may vary).
For what it is Piranha is better than it has any right to be. Given that this was a Corman production with little to no executive oversight the crew just needed to make a bare basics rip-off of Jaws and while there's DNA of Jaws on display, there's also a wry element of humor without turning into an overt comedy. More of a dry-run for characteristics of future Dante helmed projects, but one where you can see his unique style taking shape.
Piranha is a 1978 darkly comic horror film from screenwriter John Sayles and director Joe Dante who makes his solo debut having previously served as co-director alongside Allan Arkush on Hollywood Boulevard. Made for a modest $700,000 (with producer Roger Corman having cut the budget a few days prior to filming), very little was expected of the film as the crew were left mostly on their own while making something to cash-in on Jaws' success while Corman was busy producing Avalanche which was his belated entry into the Disaster movie wave of the 70s. The film became something of a sleeper for New World not only outgrossing the much bigger budgeted Avalanche, but also became New World's highest grossing film since its inception and helped launch the careers of Joe Dante and John Sayles, and Steven Spielberg called it the best of the Jaws knock-offs. Critical reception at the time was mixed with some cautiously embracing the film's tongue-in-cheek exploitative style, while with others it was dismissed as a quickie Jaws rip-off including from Siskel and Ebert. While Dante's style is very much in its early stages, Piranha shows a solid foundation for what we'd come to expect from Dante's later work.
While the movie's plot is pretty standard B-movie material with science gone horribly wrong and unleashed upon unsuspecting denizens, the screenplay by Sayles and the direction by Dante offer enough in terms of amusing characterization and wry humor intermixed with the more exploitative elements with plenty of blood and some not unwelcome shots of breasts per the standards of Corman's production approach. While the Piranha effects aren't anything too outstanding, they're nonetheless done to a successful degree giving the time and budget that was worked with that featured early work from effects mainstays like Chris Walas and Phil Tippett (including some of Tippett's stop-motion work). I will say that I'm quite surprised that the first major "feeding frenzy" sequence involves a bunch of kids at Summer camp which I'm of two minds with: On the one hand it's a bold and daring move that you wouldn't see a larger studio take, but on the other hand the acting by the kids is pretty good and they're not unlikable so it feels somewhat more at odds with the humorous parts (though your mileage may vary).
For what it is Piranha is better than it has any right to be. Given that this was a Corman production with little to no executive oversight the crew just needed to make a bare basics rip-off of Jaws and while there's DNA of Jaws on display, there's also a wry element of humor without turning into an overt comedy. More of a dry-run for characteristics of future Dante helmed projects, but one where you can see his unique style taking shape.