Piranha Piranha (1972)

This movie is about a brother and sister who head deep into the jungle.  She is going to take pictures because she is a photographer and that is what she does.  He on the other hand is there to keep an eye on her and look for diamonds.  They meet their tracker, who freaks her out by buying a gun for their trip.  See the sister saw her mother kill their father so she hates guns which *gasp* might become important to the plot later on.  After way too many scenes of walking, riding motorcycles and stock footage of animals they run into William Smith’s character, who seems to be a might bit shady.  After a “thrilling” motorcycle race that goes on forever they decide to go off in the jungle with him.  Here we get even more stock animal footage, scenes of walking thru the jungle and a boat ride.  But if there weren’t enough they go all Mondo on us and kill a deer on screen!  Eventually William Smith’s character goes nuts, rapes the sister, kills the brother and fights a lot with the original guide.  Guess what?  The sister who hates guns has to shoot him in the end of the movie.  Now that is a dramatic ending!

This is one of those movies that I can completely see being shot without a script.  The entire movie has that adlibbed “we aren’t quite sure what we are trying to make” feel to it.  I’m still not entirely sure what the point of the movie is or what story it was trying to tell.  You have people wandering in the jungle for a while (insert the stock footage) who run into what is obviously a bad guy (how could they not tell) they wander around more (more stock footage) and then he goes nuts and one of them dies.  All three of the dialogue heavy scenes do nothing other than explain why the woman hates guns and fill out the runtime of the movie.  If you removed the “padding” of this movie I don’t think there is anything other than five or ten minutes worth of fistfights left.  I’ve seen some pretty bad damn movies in my day but this is right up there with any of them.  What little we do get to see of the cast is bad.  The best actor in the bunch is William Smith, who has a couple of hilariously bad monologues about man’s nature that showed why he was best used in silent supporting roles.  Not good.

Technically this is a competently shot movie.  While the action is mind numbingly boring it does look nice.  The editor also does a decent job matching the stock footage with what they had shot of the actors, which is better than many of these cheap films ever did.  There are only a couple of special effects shots and they are obviously fake.  Think papier-mâché and rubber.   

I have two more things to mention before finishing this review.  First is that for a movie called Piranha Piranha there is a disappointing lack of the little fellers.  Other than one single scene (again stock footage) they don’t appear in the movie.  The second thing is that there is an animal death.  They shoot a dear on screen and carry it’s corpse around.  I’m not fond of killing animals for the big screen, especially when the movie is this bad.  I can’t recommend this movie at all.  If you insist on checking this one out the good news is that it is on a cheap set from Echo Bridge Home Entertainment (check here for more details).  The good news is that there are some  cheesy movies on the set that are worth checking out.

0 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2011 John Shatzer