Piranha (1978) by Joe Dante

Director Joe Dante
Year; 1978
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature

Plot:
Assigned to track down a missing friend, a private investigator bumps into a recluse living along a secret military base which housed a giant swarm of mutated piranha created for use in Vietnam who are accidentally released into the river, forcing them to work together to stop the voracious predators from devouring everything in their path.

Review:

This one turned out to be an incredibly enjoyable effort. Among its better qualities is the utterly enjoyable amount of action throughout here, as few can match the sheer fun that this movie is. This is pure campy fun, and despite that, the situations don't try to get too serious, which serves this one incredibly well by staying enjoyable throughout here. That the situations they get into instead push the cheese factor even further along, from the opening attack in the treatment pond, this one sets out rather quickly with the discovery of their remains and the resulting race to alert the authorities about their presence in the river.

As well, the film scores well with the resulting build-up to the later revelation about the fish being there and going on the rampage. These series of attacks, from the friend on the dock of his house to the father in the canoe while fishing with his son that requires a desperate rescue on the water to save him, manage to generate enough of an idea about the creatures coming for them and their dangerous attitude. Even though this is a film with mutant killer piranha attacking a community, this is handled with enough seriousness and suspense that there's a lot of fun to be had with this setup.

That all leads to the ending, which has plenty of action, tons of gore, deaths, survivors, and the bad guy gets what's coming to him. To have the kind of coordination and creativity to make that whole sequence a success is astonishing to watch because this scene gets it right. The action is shot in plain view to see what's going on, offering slowly munched limbs, a lot of very gory bite marks on faces, skin seen visibly eaten away, and an infamous scene where a piranha takes flight and latches onto a person's eyeball. At the end, there are plenty of wounds seen inflicted on survivors as well, and with tons of blood spilt in between, this will not disappoint the gore hounds out there. Combined with a nice sense of fun involving the joke-filled nature of what’s going on, there’s a lot to like here that holds this one up overall.

There are a few minor and barely detrimental issues that need to be brought up. About the only negative thing about this movie is that the film might be a bit too '70s' for some people to handle. It has that "We're spoofing Jaws and having fun doing it" feel to it, which ruins several of the other films that came out at the same time, and this is one of them. Luckily, this is one of the better ones, but it does exist here at some points. As well, there's also the fact that the film bogs down in the middle with the scenes of the two trying to get the scoffing military on board despite them all being aware of everything, yet they don't have much detrimental to knock this down.

Overview: *****/5
One of the best of its kind, the spoof-like nature works for it, mainly because there isn't a lot of seriousness in it, yet it still works wonders when it does go for the suspenseful nature. Give it a shot if you like those kinds of films or if you simply like to see killer sea creatures on the loose films while those that don’t won’t be turned off much here with the positive elements here.