Pirañas asesinas

Lee Majors heads a crack team of thieves who carry out a daring robbery in Brazil, they hide the precious stones at the bottom of a lake but don't know that it is infested with flesh eating piranha. They decide to leave them there for 60 days but double-crossers within the gang decide to grab them for themselves, with predictable results. The first half plays out like a crime thriller but it becomes a horror movie when the remaining crooks join a camera crew onboard a boat, when a tropical storm strikes the boat starts to sink. As a kid in the 1970's I loved the TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man" and Majors was one of the first actors who's name I can remember, he plays it very cool here and for his fans this film is well worth a watch. Also amongst the cast are the wonderful Karen Black and 1970's supermodel Franciscus Margaux, who plays what else but a model! The robbery at the start and dam scene near the end both use miniature sets, these are pretty good. Sadly the piranha attacks mainly consist of victims in the water surrounded by blood, we do see the fish biting people later on but it's nothing impressive. However an underwater swimmer encounters partially eaten corpses which is very effective. Shot in Brazil the scenery is nice and the musical score is pretty cool but the 101 minutes running time is too long. There has never been a human death recorded as a piranha attack and indeed people swim and bathe in piranha infested waters, however in the nature strikes back genre they can offer fun opportunities. Killer Fish has a bigger budget than "Piranha" (1978) but the latter is by far the better film.

I had a lot of fun with this movie, which is not the same thing as having a lot of fun at it. There was something cozy about its simple plot and its even simpler faith in tried and true conventions. It could be accused of many things, including laughable dialogue, hysterical performances and insane camera angles, but it could not be accused of dishonesty.

Watching Margeaux Hemingway in this movie is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Her lisp and stone-faced moroseness makes Lee Majors' eyebrow look like Marlon Brando, but she is nonetheless compelling. The same goes for the rest of the cast. You just can't believe how sincere everyone is trying to be and it's fascinating to watch.

The last third of this movie is actually good fun, sort of like "Key Largo" without all of the intelligence to get in the way.

Killer Fish is directed by Antonio Margheriti and written by Michael Rogers. It stars Lee Majors, Karen Black, James Franciscus, Margaux Hemingway and Marisa Berenson. Music is by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis and cinematography by Alberto Spagnoli.

Majors leads a band of thieves in trying to regain some stolen gems that are at the bottom of Piranha infested waters.

It's pretty bad, in fact it's a rare case where I would suggest that the low internet rating for the film is about right. OK! You wouldn't think anyone seriously goes into this type of Spaghetti Horror expecting a terrifying masterpiece, but it's not unreasonable to think that you might get some modicum of suspense and half decent acting. Unfortunately Killer Fish has neither.

Filmed on location in Brazil, there's a half decent budget afforded the production, yet the actors stare off into the distance on some sort of sleep deprived auto-pilot, forced to say dialogue so poorly written you wonder if it was being made up as they went along? The fish of the title don't show up until half hour into the pic, briefly raising hope that excitement, peril and drama will now pulse through proceedings, but it's a false dawn.

The Six Million Dollar Man and the perpetually blank Hemingway fulfil their catwalk casting assignments, and some half decent model work is introduced and blown up, but at just over an hour and forty minutes in length, it's a real chore to get through. Oh well, at least it's not insultingly bad on purpose, it is honest in its very modest intentions. 3/10

I really am convinced that Antonio Margheriti is a good director, period. "Killer Fish" is an average, but decent action/disaster/thriller with just a few horror elements. Some might say this is a "Piranha" rip-off, but it's not. Because only in the second half of the movie we get to see some piranha action. And even that isn't much. It's more their constant being there that's causing the threatening atmosphere. This is as much a crime movie as it is a disaster movie, as it is a killer-fish movie. And I simply loved the great miniature effects when the dam broke. But what struck me most, was some of the very well-written and catchy dialogue. One guy says to Karen Black: "There I was thinking you've got some German blood in you...". Karen Black denies this by responding "Uh-uh... I WIN my wars.". Or the bad guy saying "Sometimes an unloaded gun is more effective than a loaded one." (you have to see that quote in the context of the scene). And there's much more good stuff like that coming from all characters. Lee Majors is in it too, and something hit me when I saw him in this film... If George Clooney would have been big in the 70's, he would have been Lee Majors! Surprisingly this flick was a bit less silly than "Tentacoli" (which coincidentally I saw a week before, or so), so I say "Killerfish" is a good, average and watchable film. A typical Margheriti cocktail, actually.