Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 3.0 | 26/31 | Crazy Animal 2/3
Two teens are backpacking. It’s night, and they’re looking for a place to camp. They find a gate with a sign. It reads “Military Test Site. Restricted Area. No Trespassing.” So, they decide to trespass. Inside, they find a holding pool. The water feels great, so they skinny dip. One feels bites. Suddenly, his body is convulsing and blood is spreading through the water. He goes underwater. The other stays in the water and faces a similar fate.
Cut to Maggie McKeown playing a Jaws-themed arcade game. She works for a skip-tracing company — they find missing people. Her boss, Earl, gives her the details of her job — to locate the missing teenagers. She takes a plane and rents a jeep to meet up with Paul Grogan, who will be her local guide.
When she meets Paul, he’s uninterested in helping her. But when he mentions a military testing site, she insists he helps her. At the compound, they find a lab. It looks as though someone is actively using it. The jars are full of unusual creatures and one walks by that they don’t notice. Maggie drains the pool to see if the kids’ bodies are down there. Little does she know that, by draining the pool, they’ve unleashed something into the river. And a summer camp is downstream.
It’s fun seeing Corman regulars such as Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, and Barbara Steele.
It’s pretty funny that Corman slashed the budget of this movie to fund what he thought would be the superior movie: Avalanche. We lost out on stop-motion piranhas for a disaster movie I only know about because of MST3K.
Several scenes have newspapers or magazines strewn about with absurd headlines. Like an officer is reading a copy of Headquarters Detective that reads, “The Perfect Crime? Piranhas Don’t Leave Many Clues.”
The gore and the piranhas’ victims are surprising — a more cowardly movie would’ve had our heroes stop the piranhas before hurting who they do in this movie. Then again, the film becomes quite a downer.
I don’t love the movie, but I appreciate much of what it does and understand why folks love it. I wouldn’t call it better than Jaws — more horrifying perhaps — but it ranks high among the many Jaws clones that came out.