‘Horror. Terror. Death. Film at 11’: On Joe Dante’s Piranha

You know it’s a Jaws ripoff. I know it’s a Jaws ripoff. Director Joe Dante knew it was a Jaws ripoff. Super producer Roger Corman insisted it be a Jaws ripoff. Hell, it even came out the same summer as Jaws 2, much to the chagrin of the executives at Universal. But, which movie are we still talking about today? It ain’t Jaws 2. It’s Piranha.

Dante’s gloriously handcrafted B-movie creature feature remains as entertaining, outlandish, and subversive as the day it was released. The director was on hand Friday at Vidiots in Eagle Rock for a screening of the film in celebration of the 13th anniversary of Scream! Factory, a boutique DVD label specializing in mostly ’70s and ’80s horror.

“You gotta remember, this was a Vietnam War picture. This is a picture made during the war,” Dante told a sold-out house of rapt admirers. “It’s got a lot of political undertones, which can’t help but be overtones.”

It’s hardly surprising Dante and co-writer John Sayles – the pair would collaborate again on 1981’s The Howling – came together to make such a straightforwardly political film. Both men represented a kind of independent-minded, ‘60s free spirit radicalized by the Vietnam War, so of course they brought that into their art. What is more surprising is how entertaining they were able to make the film on a shoestring budget and a short schedule.

This is accomplished largely by cranking the mayhem and carnage up to 11, in that perfectly Corman-esque way of throwing ever more blood at the screen. The thing about Jaws is that the shark attacks are quite visceral and memorable, but they are few and far between. In total, five people and a dog die in Jaws. In Piranha, five people are dead before the real action is even underway.

Now, it should go without saying that Piranha is not a perfect film by any stretch. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, but it’s still flawed in the way so many B-movies of its ilk are flawed. The acting is occasionally suspect, some of the effects shots don’t hold up, and the plot is a structural mess in which many things happen just for the sake of having them happen. And getting back to the mayhem of it all, the film has two climaxes when surely one would have sufficed. 

At the same time, there’s not a thing I would change about it. That’s the magic of this brand of filmmaking, and seeing it in a packed house only makes that magic more powerful. Yes, we laugh together at the absurdity of it all, but we also cringe together and cover our eyes at the moments that still horrify. As he would later prove with Gremlins, Dante is a master of making you chuckle with delight then scream in terror within the same breath.

And, that brings us to the first of the film’s two climaxes: the summer camp. One of the fascinating things about the movie is that the heroes, played by Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies, are always a step behind the piranha. In the first place, they are the ones who inadvertently release the genetically modified killer fish into the river system. Then, they spend the rest of the movie following a trail of corpses.

The Dillman character’s daughter is attending a summer camp downstream where, naturally, the kids are earning their swimming badges on this fateful day. So, it becomes a race against time to get to the camp and save the kids. But, here’s the wild thing about Dante’s film: They don’t make it in time. And they’re not just a little late. The piranha have a veritable feast on a couple dozen 8- to 12-year-olds and some counselors before the heroes show up to pull the body parts out of the water.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning the piranha exist in the first place as an army experiment intended to destabilize Vietnamese river systems as part of the war effort. And, the army is largely concerned with ensuring this secret never becomes public knowledge. Allegorically, we understand the campers as stand-ins for the young men sent off to die in war. In actuality, though, it’s just viscerally upsetting to watch a lot of preteens screaming at the top of their lungs as they are eaten.

Had that been the ending, it would have been enough. Instead, in true Jaws fashion, we must have the civic leader who knowingly serves up the community as a buffet for the carnivorous fish. In this case, it’s the resort owner played by Corman stalwart Dick Miller, who not only insists the lake is safe but is, in fact, in league with the army. It’s as if Mayor Vaughn and the shark were business partners.

As must happen, all hell breaks loose. It’s carnage on a scale heretofore unimagined. In one of the film’s great satirical jabs at a nation that had spent more than a decade watching young men return from Vietnam traumatized, maimed, and worse, the event is covered by the local media in alarmingly deadpan fashion: “Horror. Terror. Death. Film at 11.” It’s a great laugh line, but it’s also a damning indictment of the media in 1978 and how far we have not come since.

The film spawned one direct sequel – pun intended – and a pair of remakes. I have almost certainly seen the also-Corman-produced 1995 remake more times than I have seen the original simply because it was the Piranha film of my youth. I also saw Alexandre Aja’s 2010 remake, Piranha 3D, in theaters. It’s a lovely night at the movies, but the CGI fish make one miss the tactile nature of Dante’s rubber puppets.

In the end, I think that’s the lasting legacy of Piranha. Sure, it’s a ripoff, but it’s also a film in its own right, made by true artists who said, “If we’re going to steal, we may as well steal the best we can.” And, their best was so strong that nearly 50 years later, people still gather to laugh and scream together on a Friday night.

Dante summed it well in his Q&A before the screening: “It’s a completely different business as, as you may have noticed, it’s a completely different world right now. It’s a completely different America right now, and we’re all in it together. And that’s why we gather in places like this to have shared experiences because that’s all we have left.”

A brief word on Scream! Factory

It should be self-evident but bears repeating regardless: If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it. In an era of streaming, when so many films are just instantly available with the click of a button, it is worth remembering how many films are not available. Whether it’s because an executive decided the rights weren’t worth the cost or the film simply never made the leap from one technology to the next, the history of an art form is shrinking before our very eyes. Media consolidation and corporate conglomeration do not take place for the benefit of the consumer.

Physical media mean more now than they ever have, and this is true across all art forms, by the way. Wait for the day your favorite musician no longer appears on Spotify, and you’re going to wish you’d kept a few of your old cassettes and CDs.

Scream! Factory, which partnered with Vidiots to present Friday’s screening, is the horror sub-label of home video distributor Shout! Factory. These kinds of boutique labels are cropping up more and more as the only places to find certain titles that would otherwise be ignored by the big studios and distributors. These companies do the work of restoring, preserving, and making available the history of the medium, and their efforts are worth recognizing and applauding.

After the film screening, I dropped by the small pop-up store Scream! Factory had set up inside Vidiots. I snagged a 4k restoration of Brian De Palma’s Carrie and blu-rays of personal favorite Tales from the Hood and cult classic Sleepaway Camp. With horror season right around the corner, I can guarantee each of these discs will be getting a spin very soon. I say all of this just to say: If you love something, preserve it.

Music by John Williams: Five favorite scores

John Williams has composed music for roughly 125 feature films, in addition to things like the Olympic theme and the theme to NBC Sunday Night Football and the NBC Nightly News. In addition to the works mentioned in this piece and the rest of his Steven Spielberg collaborations, you would also instantly recognize his themes for Harry Potter, Home Alone, Superman, and Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a gargantuan oeuvre to narrow down to five favorites, but that’s what we do here.

I love film music. I have written about it many times here on the site. Williams is by no stretch my favorite composer, but the importance of his work to film history and to my personal history with film cannot be overstated. I was not exaggerating when I said that he wrote the soundtrack to my childhood. I saw Jaws when I was 3 years old. It terrified and intrigued me. I couldn’t get enough. Home Alone is a holiday-season classic from my youth. Raiders of the Lost Ark and, to an even greater degree, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught me what adventure movies could be.

This music is a part of me in a very real way. It’s a part of most of us. So, how does one pick a favorite? You just go with your heart. This is what my heart says:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark – One of the things that makes Williams such a master of the craft is his work with leitmotifs, or character themes. They are the repeated phrases in the music that remind you of who this character is and what he’s about. The “Raiders March” is one of the great character themes in history – you know which one that is; it’s the music you hear in your head when you hear the name Indiana Jones – but “Marion’s Theme” is not to be slept on. One of the key elements of any adventure film is romance. “Marion’s Theme” is one of the most romantic pieces Williams has ever written, and it gives the Raiders soundtrack a depth of feeling and breadth of composition that lands this at the top of my list.

2. Home Alone – Think of how many Christmas songs there are and how much Christmas music there is. Now, try to think of how much of it is relatively new. And, I only mean newer than Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You. There’s not much. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” counts. And Williams’ main theme for Home Alone. That’s how difficult it is to enter something new into the canon of Christmas music. Sixty-plus years, and I can think of two things. The main theme to Home Alone, apart from being a Christmas staple, evokes all of the moods of the film. It’s sentimental, a little dangerous, a little mischievous. It delivers you right to this time and space.

3. Jaws – There is only one reasonable rival here: Bernard Herrmann’s “The Murder” from Psycho. You know it. The shower scene. Roughly 100 years of modern film scoring, and it comes down to these two cues for the most iconic. Here’s how you know: The parody is accomplished through the music alone. Most parody relies on story beats, characters, costumes, images – it is a visual medium, after all – but to parody or homage Jaws, you need just two notes. The same is true of Psycho. Entire film universes are contained within these cues. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, as well, how much fun so much of the rest of the non-shark Jaws music is. It’s a really jaunty adventure score. “Out to Sea” is particularly memorable. Williams says in the documentary that he thinks of Jaws as a pirate movie, and you can hear that influence in the music.

4. Catch Me If You Can – I’m sure Williams has fun every time he composes a new score, but it feels like he’s having the most fun with the jazzy, fanciful compositions he crafted for Spielberg’s cat-and-mouse story. Listen to the interplay of the instruments. It sounds like a cross-country chase, the way the instruments move back and forth and through each other. I learned from the documentary of Williams’ roots in and love for jazz. That love is infused into every note of this wonderful score.

5. Hook – This is the blatantly sentimental pick, and I presume it would be for many a millennial of a certain age. Hook is the much-maligned Spielberg film our microgeneration reclaimed. As someone who doesn’t much care for Goonies and has been told you need to see it when you’re young, I think of Hook as our Goonies. You have to see when you’re young for it to get its, well, hooks into you. 

Williams’ music hits the three key elements of the film. This is a sentimental family movie in its opening passages. Then, there is the adventure story of discovering Neverland and joining up with the Lost Boys. But, he undercuts all of this with a sense of dread and menace. In the story, the pirates are the menace, but thematically, of course, the menace is the unstoppable march of time that turns you from a child full of wonder to an adult lacking in imagination. The deft artist Williams is, he communicates all of this in 89 seconds of perfectly drawn music with the “Prologue.” Talk about delivering you to a time and a space.

New movie review: Music by John Williams

Whether you are Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, John Williams probably wrote the soundtrack to your childhood. If you were to list out the 10 most famous music cues in film history, Williams almost certainly wrote half or more of them. With 54 nominations and five awards, he is the second-most-nominated person in the history of the Academy, behind none other than Walt Disney himself. At 92 years old and still working, his cultural legacy is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. As such, it’s a little more than one can fit into a 106-minute movie.

Director Laurent Bouzereau’s film follows most of the conventions we have come to expect from documentaries of this type. We get a little bit of background information on Williams’ parents – his father was a jazz drummer who worked with the greats; his mother was an actress and dancer; they met on the set of a movie they were both working on. We get Williams’ introduction to performing music, a little of his time in the service, and how he got started in movies. Then, we work chronologically through the biggest movies in his career.

If you watch enough of these types of movies, you’re familiar with the beats. What helps separate out Music by John Williams comes down to two related factors: 1) the “biggest movies in his career” also happen to be many of the biggest and most important movies in the history of the art form; and 2) because of that, the talking-head interviews are a who’s who of film history over the past 50 years. Of course, the best insights come from Williams himself and his greatest collaborator, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg changed the face of the film industry forever, multiple times, but there is an argument to be made that he does not accomplish this without Williams’ contribution. I had this debate with a colleague earlier today, and I actually came down on the side of Spielberg likely succeeding nearly as well with someone like Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) at his side. But, there is not a bone in my body that believes had that been the case that we would have five scores as iconoclastic as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, and Jurassic Park.

These films are full of images we can hear, and that is thanks to Williams. An unknown POV underwater: BUH-BUM. An adventurer running from a boulder: BUM-BUH-BUM-BUHHH. A boy and his best friend flying in front of the moon. We know what that sounds like because of Williams.

Any one of those five films would be the crowning achievement of any other composer’s career, and yet, it is possible none of them serves in that position for Williams because, of course, there is Star Wars. One of the documentary’s truly special moments comes in hearing people describe their reaction to the opening fanfare at the beginning of A New Hope. It is as though Williams discovered fire and suddenly there is light and warmth in the world.

The other major highlight of the film is listening to Kate Capshaw describe Williams playing the Schindler’s List score on the piano for her and Spielberg for the first time. The story brings a tear to her eye – and to ours.

Moments like this will be catnip for fans of film history and fans of these movies, but they also hint at the doc’s great flaw. Every interview, every conversation, every sequence is so geared toward the legacy of Williams’ accomplishments that Bouzereau treats the compositions themselves almost as fait accompli. It sure is a lot of fun to listen to famous filmmakers talk about music we all love, but it would have been more valuable to interrogate Williams’ process of creation. Why does that horn go there? What does this violin solo accomplish? What would one more note here or one fewer note there mean?

The closest we get to this is in listening to Williams talk about his famed five-note composition for the climax of Close Encounters. He shows the camera a music sheet with 20-30 different five-note combinations and points at the circled one, buried innocuously at 15 or 16. That’s the one they used. He then demonstrates the difference a single note makes in the sequence and briefly explains the emotional effect of completing a musical phrase in different ways. This is gold, and I wish the film had space for more sequences like this.

Similarly, there is a good section of the film devoted to Williams’ time as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops, a tenure that proved somewhat controversial due to the perceived illegitimacy of film music. Williams did a lot to break down that barrier, and the film rightly credits him for that specific cultural shift.

These tangible impacts are what the movie needs more of to be fully rewarding. We understand inherently the ephemeral nature of Williams’ work, so deeply rooted in nostalgia for our childhoods and the cultural artifacts we cherished then and still hold dear now. What might give this film some depth is a deeper exploration of that nostalgia. Ultimately, Music by John Williams is like a really delicious cake. It’s sweet and satisfying and you greatly enjoy it as you consume it, but it’s not as nourishing as a full meal.

See it? Yes.

31 Days of Horror Redux: Alligator and Humanoids from the Deep

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 5: Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague, and Humanoids from the Deep, directed by Barbara Peeters

There are two unwritten rules of form and taste in horror movies: You don’t kill kids, and you don’t kill dogs. Either risks alienating the audience and turning them against your film. As we know, however, the ‘80s were not exactly a bastion of form and taste. So of course, both of these creature features, both released in 1980, feature heaps of dead dogs and at least one dead kid.

In fact, the very first victim in Humanoids from the Deep is a child, and Alligator is premised on the effects of eating a mountain’s worth of furry friends. The other thing these two films have in common is the way they are so clearly cut from the Jaws cloth, though they take wildly divergent approaches to the basic idea. Alligator is much closer to Jaws in plot, while Humanoids from the Deep is much closer in structure, but the bones are there in both.

Teague’s film is about a city beset by a genetically modified alligator that stalks the sewers, an urban legend come to life. The Chief Brody of this film is Det. David Madison, played by a game Robert Forster, who has seen the creature, but because of a checkered past, no one believes him until it is too late. Michael V. Gazzo of The Godfather Part II fame plays the chief of police, and Robin Riker is the alligator expert and love interest.

The film is written by John Sayles, who may be the preeminent Jaws ripoff artist, which I say with affection. In addition to Alligator, Sayles also wrote the Roger Corman-produced 1978 Piranha, which is shamelessly, unabashedly Jaws in style, structure, and intent. More on Corman later. Sayles, who also wrote The Howling the year after this, would move on to prestige pictures later in his career, writing Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and writing and directing my favorite baseball movie, Eight Men Out. I also have a ton of appreciation for Piranha. What I’m saying is Sayles is no slouch at the keyboard, and Alligator benefits immensely from his involvement.

By no means is Alligator a great film. The love story is shoehorned in and nonsensical. A lot of leg work is done to set up a plot about animal testing and growth hormones and corporate malfeasance, but none of it adds up to anything more than creating human villains we’re excited to see the alligator eat. Speaking of which, the movie’s greatest flaw is that it fails to learn the most important lesson from Jaws: the less we see the creature, the better.

Teague, who later directed the Stephen King adaptations Cujo and Cat’s Eye, does everything he can to put the alligator front and center as often as possible in the final two thirds of this movie. When the gator finally busts out of the sewer and onto the city streets, all is lost because the creature effect just isn’t that good. It’s so poor, in fact, that any time it kills someone, Teague plays the attack in a series of incomprehensible extreme closeups. Steven Spielberg left the camera on the surface and forced us to imagine the carnage below. Here, Teague would love to show us some carnage but is limited by budget.

Despite this, it’s still fun when the alligator attacks a wedding party, there is a lot of tension rung out of the idea of not being able to open a manhole cover, and the labyrinth of a sewer system is a wonderfully creepy setting for any horror sequence. Alligator is a good time and a fine addition to the post-Jaws creature feature canon.

So, what of the Corman-produced Humanoids from the Deep? Well, for starters, if I didn’t tell you Corman produced it, I think you could have guessed. The title, the poster, the creature effects, the gratuitous nudity – it all adds up to a New World Pictures production. I say that with no derision, only affection.

In this small seaside town, the locals are very excited to bring a new cannery to the area, while the scientists who work for the corporation promise advancements that will lead to bigger salmon in the surrounding waters. This will be accomplished by, you may have guessed, some fictional growth hormone, which has the side effect of producing super-intelligent, rapidly evolving fish people. These would be the titular humanoids from the deep.

Let’s pause and examine the connection here: two movies from the same year with vaguely similar plots set into motion largely by genetic testing, shady corporate machinations, and specifically growth hormones. Now, hormone additives in food have been around in the US since at least the 1950s, but one gets the impression that something must have been going in the news around this time that producers felt they could capitalize on. That’s what horror does best, right? It taps into the subconscious fears of the audience by making the figurative literal.

In this case, what we are literally dealing with is a horde of fish people who greatly resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon, another obvious antecedent of this picture. Within the first 10 minutes (I checked the time stamp), these fish men have killed a child and a whole bunch of dogs. This leads to a misunderstanding in which a group of locals, led by Vic Morrow, accuse an indigenous man of killing the dogs. The indigenous man opposes the cannery, so they have other quarrels, as well.

I should note that Morrow appeared in just two more films after this before his tragic death in an accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The mutants eventually make their way onto the land and beginning killing the men and raping the women, which is less graphic than it sounds but more graphic than you might expect. It’s worth noting the scenes of nudity and violence toward women were insisted upon by Corman to ratchet up the exploitation bona fides of the movie, and they were filmed behind Peeters’ back and without telling most of the people involved in the picture. The first time many of them saw these scenes was at the premiere. Most were rightly angry.

Anyway, wouldn’t you know it: The fish people’s chosen day of insurrection just happens to coincide with the town festival. This means plenty of people in the streets and an opportunity for maximum carnage and mayhem. And, in fairness to Peeters, who tried to disown the film over her clash with Corman, this sequence is truly bonkers in the best way.

Let’s bring Alligator and Piranha back into the discussion here. All three of these films feature a climax in which the creature or creatures disrupt a major event. In Humanoids, it’s the town festival; in Alligator, it’s the wedding; and in Piranha, it’s the opening of a new lake resort. In many ways, this makes perfect structural sense. Save your big set piece action-horror sequence for the end.

This is what sets Jaws apart from so many of its imitators. For the entire film, all of the characters stress the importance of the Fourth of July, and the mayor’s only mission in life is to ensure the beaches are open on the Fourth. The beaches are open, and people die. In any other movie, this would be the climax, but remarkably, Jaws still has 40 minutes left, and they’re the best 40 minutes of the movie. It’s a classic case of “You sing the words but don’t know what they mean.” Jaws is about people. Its imitators are about scary creatures.

At the end of the day, Humanoids from the Deep is fine. It is certainly not the worst picture Corman ever produced. But, if you’re looking for your creature feature fix, Alligator is the superior film here. Of course, Jaws and even Piranha are superior to that, but go with what your heart tells you.