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Piranha (DVD)


 Piranha (DVD) Movie DVD
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Piranha (DVD)

 
Description: Genre: Action & Adventure / Theatrical Release: 1978 / Director: Joe Dante / Actors: Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies ... more
Piranha (DVD) ... ... / DVD released 21 October, 2002 at MGM Entertainment / Features of the DVD: Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen / As a producer, Roger Corman has always loved to make low-budget rip-offs of hit movies, and Piranha is 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 Jaws theme 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: Piranha on 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

Newest Review: ... draining the pool and finding a skeleton. They take the man back to Grogan's house, and decide to take him into town to the ... more

 ... cops. Grogan doesn't have a car, so they have to take a raft downstream, and it's on this journey that the loon, who introduces himself as Dr.Hoke(Kevin McCarthy), and reveals that he was a Government backed scientist, called to create a form of biological weapon to unleash into the river systems of Vietnam. When the war ended, so did his funding, but he carried on his work in private, and his most successful experiment, a mutant strain of Piranha capable of living in cold water, were in the pool which the pair of them...more

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Piranha [DVD] [1978]
As a producer, Roger Corman has always loved to make low - budget ...
Last Update 25.12.2009 05:45
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Wolfzilla
Premium Review Piranha (DVD): Keep Fishin' (1742 words)
by - written on 18/03/08 (Very useful, 69 readings)
Rating:

Possibly Roger Corman's most famous, or at least most loved movie, Piranha was an early directorial job of a man named Joe Dante, who would later earn fame with excellent movies such as Gremlins and Matinee, often infusing horror and comedy seamlessly, creating very entertaining films that could be watched under any mood. When Jaws hit cinemas in 1975, a huge impact was made on cinema, and naturally numerous remakes about nature run amok followed, hoping to cash in on the success of Steven Spielberg's tale of a giant shark. Surprisingly, it took Corman, king of the rip-offs, until 1978 before his company, New World, would release their 'Jaws homage'. Joe Dante ...  Read the complete review

wampyrii
Premium Review Something Fishy This Way Comes (703 words)
by - written on 27/08/01 (Very useful, 31 readings)
Rating:

Director Joe Dante showed some of the potential he would have in later movies with this, his first offering. He of course went on to direct some classics like The Howling, and in Piranha shows some of the tongue-in-cheek humour that would be displayed to better effect in these later more accomplished efforts. That is not to say that Piranha can not stand up on its own merits, because it most certainly can. No, its not the mst brilliant movie in the world and does strangely have few really suspenseful moments, which seems somewhat impossible when you are basically talking about a movie which ought to have rested upon the same ideas as Jaws which was around at the same ...  Read the complete review

Silent+Bob
Premium Review Piranha (DVD): It Doesnt Bite (490 words)
by - written on 21/09/00 (Very useful, 28 readings)
Rating:

Piranha was Joe Dantes first attempt at directing a movie and it shows that he had some potential to go on and become a good director. Made in 1978 the year horror was changed by Halloween and Dawn of the Dead it is stil quite a fun film to watch now and again. The film opens with two people who are hiking, they come across a copmex with a fence around it, they see a swimming pool and decide to climb over the fence and go for a swim. Soon after getting in the pool they disappear, people start to notcie that the two are missing and the father of one hires a private investiagor Maggie McKeown (in the shape of Heather Menzies) to try and find them. When looking around the ...  Read the complete review

cindy1
Premium Review Killer Fish! (236 words)
by - written on 30/08/00 (Very useful, 141 readings)
Rating:

This is one of my favourite horror films. Basically a mad scientist has these highly dangerous piranhas in a pool in a secluded research centre. One night two teenagers break in and decide to go for a swim, well it pretty obvious what happens to them. The parents of the dead teenagers employ a private investigator to find them, she follows a trail until she comes across the research facility she knows there are some where in there because she finds there clothes. She suspects they may be in the pool, so she drains it, but by doing so she releases the piranhas into the river network. The piranhas make there way upstream, in their wake they leave a ...  Read the complete review

 
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