Piranha (1978)

Roger Corman died last year, and TCM did a programming salute with three nights of movies that he either directed or produced. I still have a couple I want to get through before they expire from the DVR, both some of the Vincent Price horror-type stuff from the 1960s and some of the later drive-in B fare. Up next is one from the late 1970s, Piranha.

OK, with a title like Piranha going into it there's probably a lot that you can already guess what's going to happen at the end of any given scene, starting with the opening pre-credits scene. A young man and women are going hiking in the a backwoods mountainish area when they come upon a fence that has an old "no trespassing sign". Naturally, they trespass, and quickly find a pool that's not a traditional swimming pool, but something they're not certain what exactly it's used for. Since this is a low-budget horror film, these two strip down to their undies and start swimming, only to be killed by somthing they have no idea what it is, although we can obviously guess since we know the title of the movie.

Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent by her boss, private detective Earl Lyon (Richard Deacon), to try to find the two missing people. We then get a scene with some of the locals whom Maggie will be meeting, Paul (Bradford Dillman) and Jack (Keenan Wynn), talking about how idyllic life is up here on the mountain with the river going by their cabins. When Maggie's jeep breaks down, she goes to Paul's cabin. He informs her that it's just his and Jack's cabins. Well, those two cabins and a secret military facility that was closed down some years back in conjunction with the US ending its official involvement in the Vietnam War. Once again, you can guess that they too are going to go to the military facility.

Unsurprisingly, they don't find the two missing people, since we know they're both very much dead already. But they do find a piece of jewerly the woman would be missing. So they look for a way to drain the pool, thinking that perhaps the dead bodies wouldn't have floated to the top yet. And they also find they're not alone, which should have been insanely obvious the minute they discovered the place still had electric service. There are mutant creatures, as well as a man who tries to stop them from draing the pool.

That man is Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), a scientist who was working at the facility when it was closed down, and stayed on in part to be a caretaker and in part because he wanted to keep working surreptitiously on that research. What he was working on was breeding piranha to be extra vicious, to release them in Vietnamese rivers and kill Communist resistance or some such. And Maggie and Paul stupidly released those piranhas into the river....

Sure, the plot of Piranha is dumb and unoriginal, but one goes into a movie like this looking not for intelligence or new cinematic vistas, but for entertainment. And Piranhas certainly entertains enough. On my first run-through, I was going to argue that there was a big plot hole as to how the piranhas survived all these years: wouldn't they have starved or something? But now the plot hole is how Dr. Hoak got the money to keep the place going, which I'd guess you could claim is because some arm of the government was funding it through a slush fund. Heaven knows the events of the past few months have given people enough evidence to believe the US government maintains a plethora of such slush funds.

But Piranha doesn't really have any of the sort of political overtones my previous paragraph might have implied. It's just dumb mindless entertainment for the drive-in crowd back in the day, or people who want to sit around a bowl of popcorn with friends today.