{"id":191,"date":"2007-01-07T21:44:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T01:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/191"},"modified":"2009-09-25T13:45:50","modified_gmt":"2009-09-25T17:45:50","slug":"pirahna-1978-joe-dante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/191","title":{"rendered":"Piranha (1978, Joe Dante)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Definitely a spoof on <em>Jaws<\/em>.  Actually makes a stronger case of &#8220;don&#8217;t go in the water&#8221; than <em>Jaws<\/em>.  <em>Piranha<\/em> came three years later.  Writer John Sayles&#8217; first movie!  Exec-produced by Roger Corman.  Remade twice, for some reason, once starring William Katt from <em>House<\/em>.  Sequel was of course <em>Piranha II: The Spawning<\/em>, James Cameron&#8217;s first movie.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m on a Joe Dante kick.  Obviously influenced by the film critics&#8217; strange love of his work, a nostalgic desire to see <em><a href=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/223\">Gremlins<\/a><\/em> again, and the just-learned fact that Dante was born in Morristown and grew up in Parsippany.<\/p>\n<p>Kevin McCarthy was great as the crazy scientist who secretly continues an army experiment to breed ravenous fresh-and-salt-water piranha.  Wish I&#8217;d gotten a screen shot of him before returning the DVD.<\/p>\n<p>Ambitious is the movie with a drunken, antisocial, bearded mountain man as protagonist (Bradford Dillman: Briggs in <em>Dirty Harry 4<\/em>).  He and missing persons detective Heather Menzies (of the 1979 <em>Captain America<\/em>) must warn the world of the killer piranha that they themselves accidentally unleashed&#8230; and quickly, before the fish eat Bradford&#8217;s daughter at a camp downstream.  Italian horror star Barbara Steele is the crazy scientist&#8217;s ex, who tries to thwart our heroes, along with Joe Dante fave Dick Miller (of the 1960 <em>Little Shop of Horrors<\/em>), <em>Death Race 2000<\/em> director Paul Bartel, and some army guys.  I didn&#8217;t notice, but Keenan Wynn of <em>Clonus<\/em> and <em>Laserblast<\/em> also appeared.  The two fail to stop the fish, but at least the daughter is saved.<\/p>\n<p>Movie amazingly did not suck, was more funny than anything else.  Gore\/action\/creature effects could&#8217;ve been edited more tightly, but I guess they wanted to show off what little they had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Definitely a spoof on Jaws. Actually makes a stronger case of &#8220;don&#8217;t go in the water&#8221; than Jaws. Piranha came three years later. Writer John Sayles&#8217; first movie! Exec-produced by Roger Corman. Remade twice, for some reason, once starring William Katt from House. Sequel was of course Piranha II: The Spawning, James Cameron&#8217;s first movie. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[400,8],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1970s","tag-joe-dante"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}