The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.
The opening scenes couldn’t be any more typical, with a young couple deciding that the best place to go for a swim is an abandoned military complex with a pool full of stagnant water (the opening to previous site subject Cryptozoo is similar enough that I almost wonder if it was a meant to be a reference to this.) With how much of the movie ends up playing out, it seems likely that the cliched nature of these early moments is intentional—lulling the audience into the false impression that they know exactly what kind of movie they’re getting. The plot follows skiptracer Maggie (Heather Menzies), on the trail of our cold opening corpses, who for much of the movie is played as a ditzy goofball (although there is less time for her antics during the frenzied final act), and is first seen playing the arcade game Shark Jaws, one of many self-aware touches in the movie. While searching Lost River Lake, she ends up securing the assistance of surly rural drunk Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman), who is almost never without his flask on hand, and the two find themselves at the same military complex from the opening, where Maggie decides to drain the pool—accidentally letting its hidden inhabitants out into the river.
The complex wasn’t so abandoned after all: it contained the last remnants of a US Army experiment to create a highly adaptable population of piranha that they could dump into the rivers of North Vietnam, like an animal form of Agent Orange. The war ended, but the military didn’t make sure that all their experimental piranha were dead before packing up and leaving. Now a swarm of toothsome terrors are out in the wild, much to the disappointment of the lone scientist who kept watch on his lab since then.
Bringing in the military and the lingering anger about Vietnam gives this movie a contemporary angle that other creature features of the time rarely went for—this isn’t a man-against-nature flick like Jaws, and it’s far more pointed than even the science-gone-wrong movies it’s riffing on. It’s not a throwaway plot point, either, as once the piranhas are out and ripping people up along the river, a military squad led by Colonel Waxman (Bruce Gordon) and the sell-out scientist Dr. Mengers (Barbara Steele) are there trying to keep a lid on things, which includes keeping Maggie and Grogan from talking to anyone about what they know. This is a problem, because downriver is both an aquatic theme park run by cheapskate impresario Buck Gardner (Dick Miller, playing what I suspect might be a character based on Roger Corman himself), who fills the role of the guy who refuses to close things down when there’s killer fish on the loose, and a summer camp where Grogan’s daughter is staying. Conversations between Waxman and Gardner even indicate that the former has some kind of financial investment in the park. Even compared to Jaws, this is a movie with a dim view of authority figures.
The casting is one of the places where Dante lets his genre movie fandom really go to town. The ill-fated scientist Dr. Hoak is played by Invasion of the Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy; Barbara Steele made her name in movies like Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (she also appeared in David Cronenberg’s Shivers in 1975); and, of course there’s Dick Miller, who Dante pulled from Corman’s classic horror-comedies like The Little Shop of Horrors, given another memorable role (the only problem with his character is that he isn’t in more of the movie.) Miller and McCarthy would go on to appear in most of (or in the case of the former, all of) Dante’s subsequent movies, acting not only as the through-line for his own work, but connecting it to the films that inspired him. Plus, just one year after Orca, we have another movie where Keenan Wynn gets chomped to death by an aquatic monster (this happens while he’s fishing and telling a story to his dog, who he admonishes for not paying attention)—that guy can’t catch a break!
(To recount a story Dante has amusingly told in multiple interviews: the success of this movie apparently led Dino De Laurentiis to offer Dante the job of directing the sequel to Orca—a story that may have involved the whale somehow murdering people on land. As De Laurtentiis explained, “He-a go crazy! He-a kill everybody!” Also, as everyone knows, Dante was also briefly hired to direct a comedy version of Jaws 3 that was eventually scrapped.)
There are other little nods to monster movies all over Piranha, as well, giving it a very distinct flair. Without explanation, there’s a stop motion-animated amphibious mutant scuttling around Dr. Hoak’s lab, a clear homage to the work of Ray Harryhausen (Dante apparently wanted the little monster to show up giant-sized at the end of the movie, but budgetary constraints prevented that.) At one point, someone is watching a scene from the 1957 sea-bug movie The Monster That Challenged the World on TV (thematically-appropriate footage of older movies, as well as older cartoons, becomes a bit of a recurring joke in Dante’s movies.) Most surprising of all, during a brief campfire scene at the camp, the ghost story the counsellor tells the kids is the climax of Viy. This is a movie that comes from a place of deep love for the entire genre.
Part of that genre love, too, is knowing how to play scenes for laughs, or at least structure the scenes for maximum ridiculousness. For example, Grogan tells Maggie to distract a guard (who I think is played by John Sayles) by hitting on him, to which she quickly replies “What if he’s gay?” (it’s even funnier when she subsequently does distract him by saying “Excuse me, are you gay?”) A more subtle moment is when the operator of a dam keeps dropping things so that Grogan has enough time to reach him. The entire character of buffoonish head camp counsellor Dumont (Paul Bartel, another recurring Corman/Dante player) is another great source of comedy, and at one point is seen reading a newspaper with headlines like “Dogs Tear Up Newborn Baby” and “Big Rattler Bites Teen.” This reaches fever pitch in the climax, where we see people partaking in every kind of aquatic activity as the piranha swarm barges in, and features two boats colliding and causing a massive explosion. The finale involves Grogan releasing industrial waste into the water to kill the piranha, making this the only eco-horror movie where pollution solves the problem. The fact that the movie does not operate as a pure parody, but sprinkles in different kinds of laughs alongside more straight scenes, is probably what tripped up a lot of critics who dismissed it at the time—but people who see enough of these movies will know just how different it is from what was standard, something with a distinctive voice.
There are also plenty of moments where things are definitely not supposed to be funny. The low budget nature of the film means that the piranha can never really be believable or scary, being rubber fish on poles and all (even so, the special effects crew includes Phil Tippett and Rob Bottin, who would both go on to redefine monster movie effects in the eighties), so Dante and his editors choose to either portray them more as an omnipresent contaminant in the water itself, or in extremely quick cuts of rapidly torn up bodies and churning bloody water paired with their trademark whirring dentist drill sounds. Despite all that, though, when the piranhas attack a group of the kid campers floating in the water is legitimately disturbing—maybe it doesn’t have the heft that the equivalent scene in Jaws does, but it knows well enough not to treat it as a cheap thrill. Even Dumont, up to that point simply a figure of fun, is left bloodied and staring off into the distance. The line between funny and frightening is something Dante would continually explore across his filmography.
Horror-comedy (or comedy-horror, however you want to delineate it) is a subgenre that comes out of exploring that line, and I think it’s something that was only made possible because directors like Dante understood horror movies as only a longtime obsessive could. By comparison to something like Gremlins, Piranha is a small-scale effort that shares more with its exploitation-era peers, but all the things that elevate later Dante films are there: the prodding of genre tropes, the use of great character actors, and the loving references to all the monster movies that the inspired the people behind the camera. The enthusiastic energy is entirely evident, its uniqueness among a sea of underwater menace movies out there for anyone to see, and comes with the promise of a new generation of monster movie makers taking the genre in all new directions.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 