10 - Piranha

Summary

This was one of the few positive reviews Piranha received, as Joe Dante told me when I met him in line at the Telluride Film Festival. It was also my first article on reflexivity in the horror film, a subject on which I'm still writing. It was published by Take One in 1978.

My friends have always told me that I have weird taste, that I like some of the dumbest and strangest movies. I feel I ought to warn you of that, before I suggest to you that Piranha is an absolutely dynamite horror movie, a tight old-fashioned hour-and-a-half movie with good acting, real villains, sharp editing, bright color, the whole bit. (I did feel that paying four bucks admission was a bit much, but that seems to be part of the legacy of Proposition 13 in California these days; as you'll see, that remark is not a very serious digression.) It's a movie that is easy to take seriously, that is not just right on target but as we used to say, right on. The only thing wrong with it is that it's making money by showing carnage and encouraging people to be afraid of nature, but if you can deal with that, and like horror films in the first place, you'll have a great time.