Stars: Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Barbara Steele, Dick Miller, Belinda Balaski, Keenan Wynn, Kevin McCarthy

Director: Joe Dante

Summary: At a beach resort, visitors are terrorised when they realise that the water is infested with mutant piranha fish.

"Operation Razorteeth," a government project involving the breeding of mutant piranhas, gets way out of hand when the fish raid a lake at a summer camp for kids in this Roger Corman-produced, Joe Dante-directed classic. Heather Menzies stars as Maggie McKeown, an insurance investigator out to trace a missing teenage couple who have disappeared in the woods. With the help of a drunken recluse, Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman), they come across a supposedly deserted army base inhabited by Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) who has been breeding the deadly fish in secret. In their hunt for the missing couple McKeown and Grogan drain the army pool, unleashing millions of mutant piranhas into the lake of a nearby children's summer camp and a newly opened tourist resort. Smart exploitation with a ludicrous and clever script co-written by John Sayles, this drive-in answer to JAWS is full of film references and plenty of B-movie thrills (gore and nudity). PIRANHA is the kind of movie they don't make anymore--and better yet--it holds up well.

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As a producer, Roger Corman has always loved to make low-budget rip-offs of hit movies, and Piranhais his typically cheeky take on Jaws--and, as so often with Corman, in many ways it's funnier and more entertaining than the original. Directed with gusto by schlock-horror specialist Joe Dante and sharply scripted by John Sayles, it replaces one huge underwater toothy monster with dozens of little ones and ups the body count by a factor of 10 or so. Two hapless teenagers, hiking in a remote mountain region, stumble on a secret US military research lab. They don't last long, but their intrusion leads to the release into the local river system of a huge shoal of super-intelligent piranha, originally specially bred for use in Vietnam. Downstream from the virulent little munchers lie a kiddies' holiday camp and a tacky new waterfront theme park. Lunch time, fellas!

Sayles, with his staunch left-wing credentials, slips in some mordant political satire at the expense of the military-industrial complex, and authority figures of any kind come off pretty badly, but the satire never gets in the way of the gleeful black humour. The two leads, Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies, are fairly pallid, but there are ripe cameos from such cult horror-movie icons as Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller and Barbara Steele. Pino Donaggio's score impudently borrows aspects of John Williams' famous Jawstheme while never quite infringing copyright. The movie was successful enough to spawn a much-inferior sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning(1982), which marked the inauspicious directing debut of one James Cameron.

On the DVD:Piranhaon disc comes with just the theatrical trailer as an extra. The transfer is a respectable job, reproducing the original's full-screen ratio. --Philip Kemp

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen, 16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Original Theatrical Trailer, Interactive Menu, Chapter Selection
Subtitles:	Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish
Year:	1978
Release Date:	October 21, 2002
Runtime:	92 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	15882 D V D
Keywords:	Action, General, Piranha, Adventure
Genre:	Action/Adventure