PIRANHA (1978)

 

(Director: Joe Dante. Screenwriters: Richard Robinson and John Sayles.)

 

Review

Plot: At the height of summer, a pushy, impulsive skiptracer, Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies-Urich, billed as Heather Menzies, SSSSSSS, 1973), tracking two missing adolescents in the Lost Lake River area, breaks into an experimental military lab with help from a reluctant, local drunk, Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman, DEMON, DEMON, 1975). While inside the facility, she drains the deadly pool where the teenagers died, unwittingly unleashing genetically engineered, hyperaggressive fish into local waters. Then the military shows up, worsening a bloody, out-of-control situation.

To say any more about the plot of this darkly funny, sometimes gory, campy cult classic (in the best, truest sense) is to ruin it. It’s a gutsy work, nobody—not even children—get spared in it (something that might upset sensitive parental types), an economically shot, fast-moving, lots-o’-nudity, truly-a-B-movie with a love of old horror and camp (not surprising, considering its director, Joe Dante, and its producer, Roger Corman).  Its fish-attack scenes, often shot in extreme closeups (amidst water-cloudy gore) are effective and gripping, something that can be said about all aspects of this grindhouse gem, one worth watching and rewatching, unless you’re planning to go swimming in the immediate future. Followed by PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING (1982).

 

PIRANHA’s other standout players and crew include:

Richard Deacon (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 1956), as Earl Lyon, Maggie McKeown’s skiptracer boss, who assigns her the missing teenagers case;

Keenan Wynn (KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, 1974-75, and THE DEVIL’S RAIN, 1975) as Jack, Paul Grogan’s easy-going friend, who loves fishing with his dog;

 

Kevin McCarthy (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 1956) as Dr. Robert Hoak, frenzied, onetime head of a long-dead Vietnam War-era project (“Operation: Razorteeth”) that spawned the genetically engineered piranha;

 

Barbara Steele (THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, 1961) as Dr. Mengers, scientific lead and media spokesperson of the military team trying to contain piranha/their media release, and kill the fish;

 

Bruce Gordon (CURSE OF THE UNDEAD, 1959) as Colonel Waxman, Dr. Menger’s like-minded commander of the military team;

 

Dick Miller (GREMLINS, 1984) as Buck Gardner, a local real estate agent, also interested in hiding the truth about the piranha;

 

Paul Bartel (DEATH RACE 2000, 1975) as Mr. Dumont, head lifeguard—pompous, tough-love aggressive;

 

and

 

Belinda Balaski (THE HOWLING, 1981) as Betsy, the lifeguard who tries to comfort Suzie, a girl who’s afraid of the water.

 

Deep(er) filmic dive

PIRANHA is John Sayles’s script-penning debut. He also played a “Sentry” in the film.

 

According to IMDb, “The piranha [attacks] were done by attaching rubber fish to sticks.”

 

Also from IMDb: “The extras were all paid $5 a day and given a box lunch.”

 

Also from IMDb, Universal studios was going to sue New World Pictures for making fun of Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975)—acknowledged by PIRANHA filmmakers early on, when someone is seen playing a JAWS video arcade game. The suit didn’t happen because Spielberg saw PIRANHA, really liked it, and declared it “the best of the JAWS rip-offs”.

 

PIRANHA director Joe Dante later worked with Steven Spielberg on THE TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983).

 

Actor Richard Dreyfuss, one of the leads in JAWS (1975), had an early-in-the-flick cameo in Alexandre Aja’s 2010 remake of PIRANHA 3D.

 

In Anthony Petkovich’s article “If It’s a Good Picture, It Isn’t a Miracle: An Interview with Joe Dante” (Shock Cinema magazine, issue 61, February 2022, p. 38), Joe Dante said that Kevin McCarthy was a Method actor (more so than co-star Bradford Dillman). Because of this, Dillman was “scared” when McCarthy’s character (Dr. Robert Hoak) attacked Paul Grogan (Dillman’s character) when they first meet in the film.

AMITYVILLE 1992: IT’S ABOUT TIME (1992)

 

(a.k.a. AMITYVILLE: IT’S ABOUT TIME. Director: Tony Randel. Screenplay by Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro, based on John G. Jones’s 1988 advertised-as-fiction book, AMITYVILLE: THE EVIL ESCAPES.)

Storyline

An architect brings home an antique mantle clock he bought during his business travels, unaware that it’s an evil, time-and-space-warping machine.

Review

Burlwood, California. Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht, GRAVEYARD SHIFT, 1990), an architect and intense person, returns to his suburban house from a business trip during which he picked up an antique clock. Unaware or dismissive of the history of the notorious house it came from, he’s excited to place on it on the mantle above their fireplace.

His teenage children, Lisa (Megan Ward, TRANCERS II, 1991) and Rusty (Damon Martin, GHOULIES II, 1987), are happy to see him, as is his ex-girlfriend and art student Andrea Livingston (Shawn Weatherly, SHADOWZONE, 1990), who watched the kids while Jacob was gone.

Jacob convinces Andrea─in spite of her new boyfriend─to spend the night with him. Rusty─spirited, good-hearted, and sensitive─senses something weird about the clock, but he’s not sure what it is. One of the neighbors’ dogs (Peaches) also knows something’s wrong, and barks outside the Sterlings’ backdoor late at night, running away when Rusty opens the door to let the dog in.

The next day, Peaches, normally a peaceable canine, attacks Jacob while he goes on his morning run. Jacob, seriously wounded, survives the attack. The wound extends Andrea’s stay with the Sterlings, delighting Jacob─he wants her back. Weird stuff happens, like brief time-and-space shifts for those living within the house, and Jacob’s go-getter personality becomes darker, verging on violent─he refuses to have his bandages changed, despite his festering wounds.

After a spate of mean-spirited neighborhood vandalism, dark personality changes, and bizarre deaths of those near the Sterlings, the situation comes to a head, and Jacob goes full-psycho, with his clock-dominated house as a reality-shifting accomplice.

The clever dovetail ending is relatively happy and good, a creative breath of fresh air in a genre that too often favors unnecessary darkness in its filmic wrap-ups. (Shock or the-evil-survived finishes need not bash viewers over the head with obviousness, and such endings should do more than further a franchise’s financial profitability or be used to hide the fact that the filmmakers are creatively spent, producer-pushed or lazy.)

TIME is a good, low-budget, and slick B-flick, its storyline a mix of WAXWORK (1988) and a metaphor for toxic relationships. TIME is better than the two previous AMITYVILLE outings (AMITYVILLE 3-D, 1983, and AMITYVILLE HORROR: THE EVIL ESCAPES, 1989), building on the loosely linked storyline of ESCAPES.

Randel’s direction and DeFaria and Toro’s screenplay keeps the relatively goreless TIME moving along at a mostly solid, entertaining pace (even if I did wonder why Andrea stuck around the Sterlings’ disturbing household), with an effective object backstory that adds depth to this film and (possibly) the AMITYVILLE franchise, with all its disparate works.

TIME’s cast, ranging from good to great, is effective as well, with Macht nailing Jacob’s increasingly menacing attitude, Weatherly capably embodying Andrea’s flaws, struggles and overall good nature as she tries to save the Sterlings, and Nina Talbot (PUPPET MASTER II, 1990) as Iris Wheeler, Rusty’s afterschool chess-playing partner and occult-savvy neighbor. Fans of screen legend Dick Miller (PIRANHA, 1978) might be delighted to see his brief turn here as Mr. Anderson, who helps put out a yard fire.

TIME, a mostly fun, low-budget time-space-horror flick, is worth your time if you keep your expectations realistic about its budget, its era (the slick-flick 1980s-1990s), and don’t mind a few eye-rolling tropes (e.g., Andrea and Jacob’s sex scene) during its run-time.

THE HOWLING (1981)

 

(Director: Joe Dante. Screenplay by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless, based on Gary Brandner’s 1977 novel of the same name.)

Review

Loosely based on Gary Brandner’s 1977 novel of the same name, the film version is about a television newswoman, Karen White (Dee Wallace, ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION, 1991), who’s being stalked by a serial killer. When the psycho, Eddie Quist, falls for a police set-up using Karen as bait, she’s almost raped and killed by Eddie, who’s fatally shot by the cops. Traumatized by this, she suffers from memory loss and has disjointed nightmares about her missing minutes. Her shrink, Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee, WAXWORK, 1988), suggests that she recuperate in a remote resort in the woods, Drago, where Waggner can better guide her healing.

Karen and her boyfriend, Bill (Christopher Stone, CUJO, 1983) arrive in Drago. Everybody’s friendly, if occasionally weird, some of them too friendly. One of those people is Marsha, an exotic woman who flirts with Bill. He fends off her advances, but after he’s attacked by a wolf-like creature, his attitude changes. Meanwhile, Karen is still unnerved by her unfolding-memory nightmares and the wolf howls that fill the night, some of them close to their cabin.

Back in Karen’s home city, her co-workers and friends─Terry Fisher (Belinda Balaski, GREMLINS, 1984) and Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan)─have done further digging into Eddie’s life and death, and discovered several things: Eddie’s body has disappeared from the morgue; Eddie had an obsession with werewolves, Karen, and an area that bears an uncanny resemblance to Drago. . . Eventually, Terry and Chris head up there at different times, and it’s not long before the true nature of Drago’s denizens is revealed, with wild, bloody confrontations that Karen, Bill and her friends might not survive.

HOWLING is an excellent, humorous, and clever update of the furry moon-beast genre, a satire about media and a cautionary tale about sexual repression. Its tone is lighter than that of its source book (e.g., in the book Karen is raped in her own home, and its ending is different than that of the film). Aficionados of werewolf works might especially enjoy HOWLING’s nods to previous shapeshifter films, like the name of John Carradine’s character (Erle Kenton). In real life, Erle C. Kenton (1896-1980) was a director, actor, and writer; one of the films he directed was HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), which featured Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, the iconic Wolfman of several Universal films. In several scenes of HOWLING, Chaney’s first outing as Talbot (THE WOLFMAN, 1941) plays on a television set.

So many things make HOWLING work as well as it does. Its running time is kept short (an hour and thirty minutes, every scene important to the film).  Its writing and dialogue is sharp, often clever and funny, with an underlying theme of sexual and social repression woven into its various aspects, verbal and visual. Its special makeup effects, practical not digital (HOWLING predates the latter), are top-notch, overseen by Rick Baker (AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, 1981), created by Rob Bottin (THE THING, 1982) and further brought into being by their talented special makeup effects crew.

Its cast is perfect and fun. Beyond Dee Wallace and Christopher Stone (who were married from 1980 until his death in late 1995), and others, everyone nailed their parts.

Kevin McCarthy (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 1956) played Karen’s boss, Fred Francis (perhaps a reference to Freddie Francis, who directed 1975’s LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF). Dick Miller (AMITYVILLE 1992: IT'S ABOUT TIME, 1992) played Walter Paisley, the bookstore owner who’s also a werewolf expert. Robert Picardo (GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, 1990) played Eddie Quist with playfully sadistic relish. Meschach Taylor (DAMIEN: OMEN II, 1978) played Shantz, a concerned cop. Kenneth Tobey (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, 1951) played an “Older Cop.”

The denizens of Drago include: Elisabeth Brooks (FAMILY PLOT, 1976) as Marsha; Slim Pickens (BLAZING SADDLES, 1974) as Sam Newfield; and Noble Willingham (THE LAST BOY SCOUT, 1991) as Charlie Barton.

Sharp-eyed horror fans might recognize Karen’s co-anchor, Lew Landers, who appears in GREMLINS (1984), another Joe Dante flick. James MacKrell played Landers in both films.

There are several uncredited cameos as well. Producer/director Roger Corman played “Man in Phone Booth.” HOWLING screenwriter John Sayles played a morgue attendant. Forrest J. Ackerman (RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD II, 1988) played a grumbling bookstore customer. Writer/director Mick Garris (PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING, 1990) played “Man with TV Guide.”

HOWLING is one of my Top Ten werewolf flicks, worth checking out, even if you’re a casual lycanthropy viewer who doesn’t geek out like I did in this review.