‘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.

Monday Miniatures: Back to School Means It’s PTA Season

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 15-21, 2025:

Hard Eight, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Punch-Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: Hard Eight and Magnolia - Amazon Prime rentals; Boogie Nights - Paramount+; Punch-Drunk Love - Criterion Channel; There Will Be Blood - DVD

With my most anticipated movie of the fall less than a week away and a series of pieces planned here for the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, now seemed like an opportune time to revisit each of the director’s nine previous films. I will be diving deeper into these films in separate articles later this week, so I’ll reserve comment for that. For now, let it be enough to say that this rewatch has been an absolute delight, Anderson is not only one of our most important but our most deft filmmakers, and my expectations for One Battle After Another could not be higher. 

Images, directed by Robert Altman

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I paired this with There Will Be Blood, which features a dedication to Altman, who was a mentor and inspiration to Anderson. It’s easy to see the influence in their sprawling, kaleidoscopic ensemble pieces like Altman’s Nashville or The Player and Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia. But even in something more internal and esoteric like Images, you can see the way the camera moves and actors are placed within a scene influencing the filmmaker Anderson would become.

Of course, Images is, itself, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergam, in particular the Swedish master’s Persona. Altman would revisit this theme of fractured psyches a few years later in the more lauded Three Women, which I found a tad inscrutable. Images is a nervy little thriller with an excellent leading performance from Susannah York, whom I know best from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but whom you may recognize from the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Overall, I  prefer Altman at his biggest and boldest, allowed to paint on his grandest canvases. If nothing else, Images serves as proof of Altman’s wonderful versatility, even at this early middle stage of his lengthy, prolific career.

Malice, directed by Harold Becker

How I watched it: Tubi

What my grandmother would have called hooey, this was the last Aaron Sorkin-penned script I had yet to see, and now having crossed it off the list, I understand how it could have fallen to the bottom of the priority stack. If I could say anything for it, at least in the Sorkin universe, it might not be as bad as Being the Riccardos. At least he followed it up with the unbroken run of The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game, while also sneaking in two fantastic television shows (The West Wing and Sports Night; no need to talk about Studio 60).

Sorkin doesn’t deserve all the blame here, as the underbaked script was co-written by Scott Frank, who was nearly three decades away from cementing his own TV legacy with The Queen’s Gambit. The overdirection? That belongs to Harold Becker of VisionQuest and Sea of Love fame. The appalling acting? Lay that at the feet of Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, and the usually reliable Bebe Neuwirth. 

Alec Baldwin comes out unscathed with a performance that taps into everything that would come to define the Baldwin on-screen persona: calm, cool arrogance in the face of nearly universal distaste. A year after Glengarry GlenRoss proved Baldwin could be relied upon to deliver chunky monologues about how great he is and much the rest of the world should thank him for that greatness, here, he gets the now-iconic “I am god” monologue. It’s as good as you’ve heard and mostly worth the price of admission.

Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend in this erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling and a noir pastiche in which the mystery is solved quite accidentally. Everyone involved had done better before and would do better again.

Corman’s World, directed by Alex Stapleton

Piranha, directed by Joe Dante

How I watched them: Corman’s World - Tubi; Piranha - In theaters (Vidiots)

I watched the documentary Corman’s World about legendary producer Roger Corman in anticipation of catching the Corman-produced Piranha at Vidiots, where Dante was on hand to discuss the film. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate piece. The documentary is the exact kind of hagiography one might expect, and that’s not a bad thing. There are worse folks in Hollywood to lionize, after all. We get some great interviews with Dante, Martin Scorsese, and longtime collaborator Jack Nicholson, who credits Corman for giving him work when no one else would.

The thing I wish there were more of: the movies. At the time this film was made in 2011, Corman had literally hundreds of credits to his name. It would be unreasonable to dig too deeply in the span of a 93-minute documentary, but one wishes Stapleton and Co. had zeroed in on a few choice examples, Piranha perhaps foremost among them.

Corman was well known for his ability to shoot quickly on tight budgets, but it would have been fascinating to highlight more of the specifics on how he accomplished that. Instead, the film focuses more on Corman’s status as the father of the New Hollywood movement, giving directors like Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and more their early shots at filmmaking. It’s a fair focus, but it ultimately means the film settles for surface-level appreciation rather than rigorous study.

12:08 East of Bucharest, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

A key film in the Romanian New Wave, this comes a year after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu put the nation’s cinema on the map at Cannes and a year before the Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days conquered the Croisette. Porumboiu’s film is perhaps smaller in scope than either of those two efforts, but it is no less ambitious.

The original Romanian title of the film literally translates to “Was it or wasn’t it?” As the film ultimately makes clear, the question refers to whether the small town of Vaslui was involved in the 1989 revolution that deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The 12:08 of the international title refers to the time of day when Ceausescu gave up power. Up for debate is whether the people of Vaslui protested in the streets before 12:08 p.m. or celebrated in the streets after in the safety of a nation free of its dictator.

Porumboiu uses his characters to ask vital questions about who benefits from a revolution, who gets left behind, and what any of it means anyway. It is an incontrovertible good that Ceausescu was removed from power, but it is fair to ask what kind of nation should spring up instead.

The Man Without a Past, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

This was probably the most popular Kaurismaki title I had yet to see, and it may be my favorite of all his films, or at least right up there with Le Havre and Fallen Leaves. Kaurismaki is the ultimate humanist in that in his best works, the vast majority of people are decent and kind, while systems and bureaucracies serve to oppress and deny.

Here, a man played by Markku Peltola arrives in Helsinki via train and is immediately mugged and beaten within an inch of his life. As a result, he develops amnesia. So, with no identification and no memory, he begins to slip through the cracks of society. The community members around him, many of whom find themselves also forgotten by society, become his saving grace.

At every turn, he is thwarted in his attempts to apply for benefits, to find work, to navigate the legal system simply because has no name and no past. It is not enough that he is a human being, alive and real, sitting right before you. Systems are not set up for this, and it should come as little surprise that it takes a human to understand humanity. As our economic and political leaders further push algorithms and artificial intelligence on us, we would do well to remember this lesson.