“What about the goddamn piranhas?”
“They’re eating the guests, sir.”
Though it exists in the overcrowded market of nature-gone-awry exploitation flicks that tried to ride the coattails of Jaws (1975), Joe Dante’s vigorous and playful sophomore feature Piranha should be viewed as a low budget homage par excellence—perhaps only trailing Ron Underwood’s Tremors (1990) when it comes to cheekily lacing Spielberg’s formula with delirious camp elements.
A scatterbrained skip tracer (Heather Menzies) is dispatched to track down two missing teens, hiring the reclusive local drunk (Bradford Dillman) to guide her around the backwoods trails. They soon find themselves poking around a former military research facility up in the mountains, discovering that it had not been abandoned after the war as presumed, but indeed remains operational under the aegis of a manic old biologist (Kevin McCarthy) whose life’s work involved the creation of a genetically-modified strain of piranha meant for use as a weapon against the Viet Cong. Soon these vicious creatures are unwittingly flushed from their holding tank into the nearby river which grants them access to a lakeside resort and a summer camp’s worth of kiddie arms and legs dangling from inflatable tubes. (There’s an interesting diversion here when the trespassers are investigating a lab of grotesque experiments in pickle jars and are silently observed by a miniature stop-motion lizard-fish monster that never reappears. A little touch of background mystery.)
Granted a relatively substantial budget by producer Roger Corman, Dante crafts Piranha into a gleeful drive-in exploitation picture that is brimming with cheap gore and other gimcrack effects, and yet also shot through with a deep strain of humanity and buoyed by understated craftsmanship. The story and aesthetics are the stuff of run-of-the-mill B movies, but a few characters are played straight enough to give the thing a real emotional heft. Indeed, a wordless exchange of glances between Paul Bartel’s camp counselor and Dillman’s soused loner in the blood-drenched aftermath speaks volumes where a lesser movie would have fumbled. But then it also has an excellent sense of humor and winking self awareness that allows the audience to find a bloody massacre exciting as well as horrifying. The flimsy effects (endearing as they might be in and of themselves) are smoothed over by masterful editing from Dante, nifty sound design, rich mise en scène throughout, and a sense of scale he achieved with a large cast of extras and extravagant props during the climactic feeding frenzy.
While the film is delicious enough on the merits of its high-grade camp alone, a side plot involving a shady resort owner (Dick Miller) and a pair of government fixers (Bruce Gordon, Barbara Steele) gives the film an anti-establishment bite, taking shots at frivolous military spending, the morality of unchecked scientific pursuit, political corruption, and media complicity in the spread of misinformation. It’s this story element that clarifies the film’s status as a sincere reworking of 1950s creature features with an eye toward revising the genre’s tropes.
Much more than a well-made Jaws ripoff, Piranha brings together all of its filmmaking elements into a compelling, coherent, and most importantly, extremely fun horror comedy that introduced Joe Dante’s brand of cine-literate, twisted cartoon humor to the world of cinema.