Ask me who some of my favorite directors are, and many of the ones I cite will make me sound like a real movie snob: Kurosawa, Scorsese, Kubrick, Spielberg, and so on. But one man who doesn’t quite fit that mold and whose work has always held something of a soft spot in my heart is Joe Dante. Dante’s work may look like horror or sci-fi, but they also tend to be broad comedies. I found movies like Gremlins and Innerspace far more amusing than anything else, and his underrated Looney Tunes: Back in Action is actually for my money the best infusion of the classic Warner Brothers characters with live action that wasn’t produced by Disney. And like a lot of directors of his generation, Dante got his start with exploitation king Roger Corman.
But there’s still a very Dante-ish feel to one of his first movies in the director’s chair, 1978’s Piranha.
Two teenagers backpacking through a remote area find a pool near a lab behind a locked gate and decide to go swimming. Then something inside the pool eats them. A lot of somethings. Enter skiptracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies), a young woman who specializes in finding missing people. She recruits backwoods drunk Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) to help her, and their search takes them to the same lab. Maggie finds the missing girl’s locket by the pool, so they opt to drain it, but not before checking out the lab and finding out it isn’t as abandoned as it looks, and they didn’t even see the fish-lizard hybrid running around.
That fish-lizard hybrid doesn’t really do anything, but the very appearance of such a thing is another clue this is a Joe Dante movie.
Another is the presence of recognizable character actors that Dante has worked with many times over his directorial career, and one of them appears to try and fail to stop Maggie and Paul from draining the pool into a nearby river. It’s always great to see Kevin McCarthy in a role like this, and his Dr. Hoak knows what’s up: the pool held some specially bred piranhas that were whipped up by the DoD during the Vietnam War. Never deployed, these fish are smart, can live in environments normally too cold for piranhas, and they’re pretty damn hungry. And now they’re loose in the local river. With a summer camp full of kids who love swimming, including Paul’s daughter, nearby plus a big water-themed park opening a bit beyond that, the military trying to keep this somewhat covered up, and the open ocean nearby, Paul and Maggie have their work cut out for them to keep the fish from reaching said ocean and then becoming essentially unstoppable.
So, here’s the thing: this one was fun. It’s not meant to be taken all that seriously, and Dante’s movie takes its time to do things that a more straight-laced horror movie would do. Besides the presence of actors beyond McCarthy who would work with Dante many times going forward, most notably Paul Bartel, Belinda Belaski, and especially Dick Miller, this is a movie that will stop in its tracks from time to time do to some more comedic scenes, many of them involving Bartel’s uptight head of the summer camp, or even just wax euphoric over some lost piece of Americana. Miller, as the owner of the water park, laments a bit about how side show attractions just aren’t around anymore. What does that have to do with killer fish? Not a damn thing, but they do make for nice scenes.
Which is not to say this is a movie without any blood or gore or female nudity. This is still a movie produced by Roger Corman, and he has a reputation. But it is the sort of movie to put kids in jeopardy, let a couple get bitten, but as near as I can make out, not kill any of them. There are victims, but they all appear to be adults, and there are characters, like the ones played by Bartel and Miller, who might have been victims in a lot of other movies but manage to walk away in this one. Are the piranha effects top notch? Aside from the stop motion lizard hybrid, which again doesn’t really do anything aside from appear in one scene, not really. But this was mostly just a fun horror movie where there were probably more laughs than screams and still have a decent body count.
By the by, I have no plans to watch the sequel. It’s been universally panned even if the director of that one, making his directorial debut, went on to an even bigger career than Joe Dante. But I think in many cases, I actually prefer the work of Dante over James Cameron anyway.
Grade: B+
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