Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Joe Dante
• Written by John Sayles
• Starring
  • Bradford Dillman
  • Heather Menzies
  • Kevin McCarthy
  • Keenan Wynn
  • Dick Miller
• Produced by Jon Davison and Chako von Leeuwen
• Executive produced by Roger Corman and Jeff Schechtman

This is a movie that has no right to be any good. Yet another of the “animal attack” movies made in the wake (sorry) of Jaws, it never tries to pretend that it wasn’t inspired by the big rubber shark. (I mean, there’s Roger Corman’s name right there; to try to claim that it’s not derivative would be more than a little disingenuous.) It is, however, one of the best of that crop — though when your competition is mostly Italian schocklmeisters and regional “auteurs,” it doesn’t take much to rise to the top.

In this case, Corman was smart enough/lucky enough (depending on who you ask) to farm the work out to two individuals with few professional credits but lots of potential: director Joe Dante (who went on to helm such films as The Howling, Gremlins, and Innerspace) and screenwriter John Sayles (who also worked on The Howling, and received Oscar nominations for his later scripts Passion Fish and Lone Star). These fellows knew that they weren’t being called upon to create ambitious cinema, but they also couldn’t bring themselves to churn out a paint-by-numbers trend-follower. So instead they concentrated on being honestly entertaining, and (as the name of the genre would imply) even horrifying at times.

Yes, thank you. We get it already.

Our opener takes place on a wooded mountain at night, with a hiking couple looking for a campsite. (Note: If a horror movie begins with hiking, camping, fishing, or anything remotely outdoors-y, you probably needn’t bother learning the characters’ names.) They find an abandoned-looking complex surrounded by NO TRESPASSING signs and a chainlink fence with a gap in it, and since those signs are just put up to taunt weary travelers, they venture inside. There they find an Olympic-sized pool or tank, filled with greenish water, and immediately decide on a moonlight swim. (Eww. Taking a dip in what they should assume to be a brackish body of standing water would leave you worse off than sleeping in your sweat.) And with the underwater POV shots staring up at them, it’s not long before something(s) nibbles their toes and starts chewing out vital organs.

The story proper gets under way as big city skip tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) sets out on a different kind of assignment, to find the missing hikers. She makes it up the mountain in her rented jeep and tracks down morose mountain man Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) to find out if he’s seen anything and generally get the lay of the land. When he mentions the closed-down army test facility further up the mountain, we get the following:

“You’re taking me up there.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.”
[Gilligan cut to the two of them in her jeep, heading up the mountain.]

Gilligan cuts. Gotta love ‘em.

“Me? Oh, I’m just doing a cameo for my friend Roger.”

The installation is just as deserted in daylight, and Maggie finds a locket on the edge of the tank with the missing girl’s initials on it. Suspicious of the contents of the murky tank, they go inside one of the lab buildings to find a draining switch, and find shelves of strange specimen jars (or rather, jars of strange specimens) and a cup of still-warm coffee on a desk. (There’s also a little bipedal stop-motion frog-creature running around in the background, unnoticed. It’s very unlike Roger Corman to spring for such throwaway details — it has absolutely nothing to do with the story — but I loved it. In fact, if the title of the movie weren’t Piranha, I’d have loved to see the sequel center on the frog-thingie.)

The owner of the coffee cup becomes apparent once Maggie finds the hikers’ backpacks in the corner and decides to drain the tank into the river to get to the bottom of things, so to speak: a crazed and dishevelled scientist (Kevin McCarthy, who somehow resists declaring, “You’re next! You’re next!”) leaps out and tries to keep them from the switch, but together they bonk him unconscious.

At the bottom of the tank they find only a few disarticulated animal bones, but anything else could easily have fit through the grill and into the river. And while they’re at the bottom of the tank, sci-guy wakes up and steals their jeep (big city go-getters leave their keys in the ignition?), only to crash it and do further damage to himself. (Stupid scientist.)

After a night in Grogan’s cabin with the groggy scientist trussed to a bed, the three head downriver on a raft (the only vehicle in working order that can carry all three of them). Sci-guy finally starts communicating when he sees Maggie dangle her fingers in the water. His name is Dr. Robert Haok, and she really oughtn’t do that, because draining the tank yesterday released a school of specially-bred, temperate-friendly piranha into the river.

“So… wanna play lumberjack?”

See, the story is that the army was breeding non-tropical super-piranha to release in the waterways of North Vietnam. Then the war (excuse me, “police action”) ended, so the army shut the test facility and poisoned the specimens. But a few proved hardier than the poison, and rebred themselves into a full-sized school in no time. So Hoak stayed behind in the abandoned complex to study them and care for them because, hey, he’s a scientist. That’s what they do.

No, that last comment was unfair on my part. Hoak could easily have been written and played as a typical myopic researcher whose narrow obsession blinds him to the Big Picture of human lives, good’n'evil, and all that. But Sayle’s screenplay and McCarthy’s performance create a more nuanced character. The scene you’d normally see would have the protagonists railing on the Man of Science, who’d defend himhself as being, well, a Man of Science. But here, Grogan and Maggie barely have to say anything, because Hoak rehearses all of their criticisms for them, so that when he justifies himself, it clearly comes across as a self-aware rationalization. And right after he gives his most impassioned “Don’t blame me — I’m just a scientist!” speech, he immediately tries a foolhardy rescue, almost as an act of atonement, for a boy stranded on the overturned bottom of a capsized canoe.

Because the piranhas have been busy little fishies since their release. First they got Grogan’s fellow mountain man Jack (a very drunk Keenan Wynn), nibbling his dangling feet so badly that he bled to death by the time the raft came by. And then they got the father of the boy on the canoe, leaving him for who knows how long in a precarious position.

Now, if you want to scare me, put a believable and fairly innocent person in very immediate danger. But if you really want to reach in and squeeze my small intestine, do the same thing to a child.

Which makes it all the more ominous when Grogan realizes that his daughter is at the lakeside summer camp only a few more miles downstream.

“Anyone know some songs from Big River?”

Dante and Sayles make great use of “ticking clock” suspense throughout the movie. First Grogan has to make it to the dam to keep them from doing their daily release and sending the piranhas into the lower lake. Then later, once the piranhas have found the small side stream that gives them access downstream, he has to evade the inevitable army coverup personnel and get to the summer camp to save his hydrophobic daughter… and then they have to make it further down, where the new Aquarena resort is having its grand opening.

The army coverup, by the way, is more than your standard “governmental evil” in action; the colonel in charge of the old project (”Operation Razorteeth,” which pretty much proves that all the good codenames were taken) and now in charge of the cleanup was also instrumental in the landgrab that made the resort possible, and is now a silent partner with sleazy entrepeneur Buck Gardner (Dick Miller).

Yes, much of this is standardized, but it still works. Dante knew exactly what to imitate from Jaws so that this movie would work well; and thus we get many underwater POV shots, tightly-edited attack shots of hyperactive mouths gouging at flesh (editing also helps to mask the fact that the piranha models were probably pretty unimpressive rubber fishies), and plenty of blood in the water.

In less technical terms, there’s also the oppressive threat of danger — before we even know that there’s a dam barricading the piranhas’ path downstream, we’ve been introduced to young Suzie Grogan (Shannon Collins), trying desperately to get out of her swimming requirements. It’s set up so well in advance that for half the movie you know, you just know, that the piranha are going to make it to the summer camp, and every otherwise cheerful scene of happy children splashing on inner tubes is cringe-inducing.

Buh-dum. Buh-dum. Buh-dum buh-dum buh-dum buhdumbuhdumbuhdum…

Kudos, by the way, to Sayles and Dante — and Corman, for that matter — for having the guts to actually put children in danger, and ultimately under direct attack. With far too many filmmakers then and now putting out “safe” bubblegum horror films, it’s actually refreshing to see someone with the integrity (an odd word, I admit, but I think it appropriate) to actually scare and unsettle their audience. A horror film that leaves you comfy just ain’t doing its job.

As I remarked before, it’s an unambitious film; it’s very consciously a follower, not a leader. But even in those places where B-movie filler makes up the plot, Dante and Sayles still had fun with it (though the movie isn’t even close to being a “spoof,” as it’s often labelled). When Maggie and Grogan in a tent under army guard, Grogan naturally proposes that Maggie distract the single guard with her feminine charms. “What if he’s gay?” she asks. “Then I’ll distract him!”

My only real complaint (and this very well might be me, more than the movie) is that the most nerve-wracking dime is spent too early. Once the children are attacked in the water, it’s almost impossible to generate a comparable level of panic — much less the ramped-up one appropriate for the movie’s climax — seeing a bunch of adults in similar dire circumstances. Granted, the number of bodies is greater at the resort, but pure numbers doesn’t equal greater scares. And especially since the summer camp attack managed to have absolutely zero casualties among the children, despite five minutes of piranha chomps (there’s one fatality, but it’s naturally a camp counselor, and I call that cheating), the level of tension isn’t nearly what it was before the children were attacked.

Such complaints notwithstanding, it’s a more enjoyable horror/suspense film than nine-tenths of the stuff produced, on any budget and for whatever commercial reasons. While I’m sure that Steven Spielberg groans in dismay at some of the schlock that was inspired by Jaws (or, more specifically, its box-office returns), he tapped Joe Dante to work with him on Amazing Stories, and then produced both Gremlins movies and Innerspace. Apparently Spielberg didn’t think Piranha was too shabby a movie either.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 19 (conservatively)
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Dick Miller (”Buck Gardner”) played “Vendor” in the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye,” and “Vin” in the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”