Piranha (1995)


In 1995 Showtime got together with b-movie maven Roger Corman to create an ongoing series called Roger Corman Presents.  Although he was finished with directing he still produced tons of movies per year, often going direct to video, and Showtime figured this was a cost-effective way to create original programming.  They were right as Corman did what he could to keep the movies below 1.5 million dollars each, and that meant a lot of cost cutting.

The result was that a good number of the films were remakes of earlier Corman movies such as Not of This Earth and, in this case, the 1978 Joe Dante film Piranha.  It was Dante's feature debut as he had been working with Corman, and it featured a script by up-and-coming arthouse favorite John Sayles.  Like many of Dante's films to come it featured some great b-movie horror combined with subversive, tongue-in-cheek sequences.  It was a ripoff of Jaws, but it is remembered for its sly self-reverence as well as some never-explained stop-motion creatures from David Allen.  This remake, in contrast, is pretty much not remembered at all, overshadowed by better entries in the series and by the T&A-filled reboot Piranha 3D.  

After his niece Barbara (Lorissa McComas) goes missing real estate mogul J.R. Randolph (Monte Markhan) hires detective Maggie McNamara (Alexandra Paul) to find her.  She enlists the help of a local recluse named Paul Grogan (William Katt) to show her around.  This leads them to a seemingly abandoned military test site with a pool, which Maggie drains in order to search for Barbara's body.  When they do so they are attacked by Dr. Leticia Baines (Darlene Carr).  When she comes to she informs them that they have just released a school of genetically mutated piranha into the local water system.

Paul tries to warn Randolph, but his words fall on deaf ears.  The grand opening of his new lakeside development, created by a dam downstream, is set to go off in a big way.  However, Paul's daughter Susie (Mila Kunis) is also downstream, and it turns out the piranha have also been bred to survive not only in all temperatures of fresh water, but salt water as well, and the river they are in flows straight out into the ocean. 

Although some roles have been gender swapped and there is some additional dialog here and there to bring the film into the '90s this is pretty much a carbon copy of the original, right down to re-using the effects.  What it didn't reuse is the humor.  There are a few jokes here and there, and a few of the best lines are kept from the original, but Corman insisted a good deal of the funny parts be removed to shorten the runtime. 

The result is that, although pretty much everyone on screen does a solid job, this comes across as a limp and unnecessary remake.  Piranha 3D is far from clever, but everyone involved knew that the humor helped sell the ridiculousness of the plot, and here it just seems like everyone is on board for a paycheck and nothing else.  There is a bit of gratuitous nudity thrown in, but nothing that spectacular to want to sit through this when the original is so readily available. 

Piranha (1995)
Time: 89 minutes
Starring: William Katt, Alexandra Paul, Monte Markhan
Director: Scott P. Levy

 

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