Piranha (1978)

With the upcoming release of the seemingly overly gory remake and the recent re-release of the original on DVD and Blu-ray, I thought this would be a good opportunity to finally check out the film that's regarded by many as one of Roger Corman's greatest B-movie successes.  Like most of Corman's projects during this time, Piranha is a film that takes a lot of it's inspiration from some larger blockbuster successes, and on this occasion it's Jaws.

When two unsuspecting teenagers break into an abandoned mountain military research center they probably didn't expect to be eaten alive by piranhas during a midnight swim.  Eventually the two are reported missing by their families and Maggie (Heather Menzies) is hired to hunt them down.  In her investigation of the area where they were last seen she runs into Paul Grogan, a very unsociable individual who spends most of his days drinking and being exceptionally angry with the world.  Maggie, being rather blunt and outspoken, forces Paul to take her up to the military research center she's heard about believing the two missing teens might have hiked there.

When they arrive it appears the research center is not completely inactive as they discover a lab full of strange creatures.  Thinking it's possible the two might have drowned in the cement lake outside Maggie decides to drain it, draining the water and also the contents of the pool into the river, a pool of genitally engineered piranhas!  The piranhas were specially breed to be able to thrive in both salt and fresh water as a weapon to be used in the Vietnam war.  The initial plan was to fill the Vietnamese's water supply and destroy the entire population.  When the war ended abruptly that plan never became a reality, but the one scientist responsible for creating them kept some alive and continued to perfect the species.  Now with an unlimited population in the local river and numerous people dying as they make their way down stream towards the ocean, Maggie and Paul must find a way to stop them before more people die, or worse before they make it into the open oceans and spread everywhere.

I don't know what I expected out of Piranha but I must admit I was a little disappointed.  Compared to some of Corman's other productions Piranha is unusually tame in terms of the amount of gore.  It's been a while since I've seen Jaws, but I think it has more going for it in terms of gruesome shark attacks.  As always the greatest aspect of a B-movie, and especially a Corman picture, is the over-the-top gore, without that most of these films are simply mediocre rip-offs of films with superior acting, story and overall are more entertaining to watch.  For me Piranha is borderline boring, the acting is actually worse than prior Corman films I've seen, and the main characters are quite dull.

From what I've seen of the remake it looks to compensate for the originals tamer side with some of the most gory scenes I've ever seen in a film, although the CGI piranhas look quite lame compared to the originals prop fish.  It will be interesting to see how the new one stacks up in terms of story and acting, it shouldn't be too hard to top it in that department.  Overall, I'm a little amiss at the amount of love this film receives compared to some of the better productions Corman has been behind.  While the film definitely has some cult appeal it's missing that usual amount of over-the-top cheesiness you come to expect from a Corman project.  Maybe the fact that this film is more of a by the book creature feature is why it draws so much appeal, but for my tastes it could have stepped it up a little more.

5/10