Piranha (1978): B+

Of all the late ‘70s-early ‘80s Jaws knockoffs, none balanced tongue-in-cheek humor with out-and-out gore as deftly as Joe Dante’s Piranha, produced with the low-budget aid of legendary B-movie impresario Roger Corman. Scripted by John Sayles with a preference for knowing wink-wink jokes (such as the bookending sights of a Jaws videogame and a woman reading Moby Dick), Dante’s aquatic horror show involves an investigator named Maggie (Heather Menzies) who, while searching for two missing kids around Lost River Lake, teams up with a drunken recluse named Paul (Bradford Dillman) after accidentally setting loose a batch of mutant flesh-eating fish into the water near a kid’s summer camp and swanky resort. Fast, loose and equal bits cartoonish (including a trademark Dante nod to classic animation) and gruesome, the film underlines its extreme bloodletting – including two superbly choreographed piranha attacks on children – with some caustic commentary on the dastardly self-interest of the government, which seems to have created the gilled monsters as a tool to win the war in Vietnam. Such anti-establishment undertones, however, aren’t as vital to Piranha’s cheesy delights as are its leads’ off-the-cuff chemistry, amusing turns by Dante regulars Dick Miller, Belinda Balaski, and Kevin McCarthy, its (underutilized) stop motion-animated creatures, and the sound of iconic Bava beauty Barbara Steele pronouncing the titular fish “piraneeya.”