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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.

Next to Joe Dante's minor exploitation classic, this is already the second "Jaws"-rip off that revolves on piranhas, but the comparison stops right there with the mutual choice of killer fish as the sea monsters. Dante's film is of course better and more relevant, but "Killer Fish" is a typical Italian exploitation product and thus delivers too many grotesque story lines, some neat gore and an unusual cast. Heck, I'm not even sure this film fully qualifies as a "Jaws"-rip off since the main plot involves a diamond heist instead of a besieged tourist resort. Although... it has that, too! A well-organized bunch of thieves successfully complete their diamond robbery and lower the loot to the bottom of the lake for safety reasons. After 60 days – if the police give up their search – they will collect the diamonds again and split. In order to guard his precious jewels, criminal mastermind Paul Diller infested the lake with ravenous piranhas that can regularly nibble from the double-crossing team members. Meanwhile, one of the crooks falls for a model with a speech-defect and a tropical hurricane busts a large dam, allowing the piranhas to spread themselves all across the touristy waters. Antonio Margheriti's "Killer Fish" suffers from a slightly tedious and hesitant opening half hour, but it get more adventurous once the first victim is devoured under the water. The piranha effects as well as the underwater cinematography are a bit disappointing but this film has an irresistible 70's charm, complete with cool soundtrack and stereotypical characters. Lee Majors is excellent as the macho with more hair on his chest than brains in his skull and Karen Black is a great shrew. Not as good as I hoped, but a fun piece of Italian trash nonetheless.

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.

The only way to really appreciate this clunker is to view it with gang at MST3K.

I love Italian genre films from the 70s and 80s - horror, sci-fi, giallo, WIP, nunsploitation, whatever. This Italian-French-Brazilian co-production is an action/adventure/thriller/horror hybrid, made to ride the wave of Spielberg's Jaws a few years earlier. A bunch of professional thieves steal a quantity of emeralds from a tropical industrial complex. They hide the gems at the bottom of a reservoir, intending to retrieve them 60 days later once the heat has died down. Unbeknownst to them, their man on the inside has decided to stock the reservoir with piranha to prevent anybody finding the stones or retrieving them early. Sure enough, some of the gang decide to go back and help themselves without telling anyone else - you can guess their fate. A sudden storm breaches the reservoir dam and the deadly fish are carried to all the other local waterways - including tourist spots. As the human population starts getting bumped-off (i.e. Eaten), those remaining find themselves cut-off from help and fighting for survival.

Antonio Margheriti (here under the alias 'Anthony M Dawson') directed some pretty enjoyable, even good genre films over his career. Unfortunately, this isn't one of them. At 101 minutes it feels overlong, drawn-out, and uneven. The characters are pretty thin, the cliched dialogue lacks any real 'punch', and (talking of punches) the fight choreography is poor. As far as the cast goes, the leads are all American; Lee Majors, Karen Black, Margaux Hemingway, James Franciscus, and Gary Collins (sad to think Majors is the only one still with us). Also popping-up (in a relatively minor role - maybe he needed an easy paycheck) is Italian 'spaghetti western' favourite Anthony Steffen. Lee Majors is likeable as ever (shame he didn't do more on the big screen), whilst Karen Black is her usual drop-dead, lazy-eyed sexy-as-hell self; the rest pretty much just go through the motions. At least the scenery's nice (it was filmed in Brazil), and the fish make an effort. 4/10.

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.

At the beginning some robbers carry out a heist at a factory , robbing a lot of valuable jewels . Later on , they hide the loot into a river, unknowing it is full of piranhas . Soon after , the Jewel thieves attempt to recover the loot of hot rocks at the piranha infested river . But the stealers find a lot of problems to retrieve them as if took a lot of foresight.

This thrilling film concerns typical plot about a robbery that goes wrong , as a scheme to steal and then to hide a fortune in emeralds at the bottom of a tank full of piranhas backfires as the criminals find it impossible to retrieve them . The film attempts to blend two genres : Disaster movie including a spectacular Dam bursting with flood sweeping a factory and the sea monster sub-genre with starving piranhas . In fact , this is one of several films made in the mid-70s and early 80s following the Catastrophe movies as Earthquake , Tower inferno , and after hits as Piranha, Piranha 2, Jaws , Tintorera, Devil Fish, Barracuda, Tentacles , among others . This Killer Fish boasts a good cast but really wasted giving average performances . Stars Lee Majors and Karen Black as two cunning and roguish thieves . Supported by a decent support cast as Margaux Hemingway , Marisa Berenson , Gary Collins, Frank Pesce , Roy Brocksmith , and James Franciscus . Furthermore, special appearance by Anthony Steffen , the known Spaghetti Western antihero , who died in Río de Janeiro , Brazil.

It contains a passable and acceptable cinematography by cameraman Alberto Spagnoli . As well as anticlimatic musical score by Guido and Mauricio de Angelis , adding some catching songs ."Deadly Tresure of Piranha" was middlingly directed by Anthony M. Dawson AKA Antonio Margheritti. He was a good craftsman who made all kinds of genres , such as Wartime : The Last Hunter , Tornado , The Commander , Code Name Wild Geese . Adventures : The Golden Arrow , Ark of the sun...temple of hall , Jungle Raiders, Treasure Island , Mister Invisible . Spaghetti Western : And god David to Cain, Dakota Joe, Vengeance , Joe the Implacable , The Stranger and the Gunfighter, Take a hard ride . Terror : Virgin of Nuremberg ,Web of Spider , Seven dead in the cat's eye , The long hair of death , Castle of blood , Horror Castle , Cannibal in the streets . Science Fiction : Yor the Hunter from the future , War of the planets , Wild Wild Planets . Peplum : Hercules prisoner of evil, Giants of Rome , The Slave merchants ,The Fall of Rome. Thriller : Operation Goldman, , Killers are challenged, The Squeeze , Death Rage. Rating : 4/10. Below average.

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

1978's "Killer Fish" arrived for director Antonio Margheriti after his Gothic horror, Spaghetti Western, and science fiction periods, just before the trend for cannibal zombies emerged in the wake of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead." His expertise for special effects came in handy for a number of explosions and tornado-inspired destruction (the miniatures do look quite fake, however), but the script offers no surprises for an international cast that popped up on location in Brazil as a package deal put together by star Lee Majors. Plotwise, it's an ordinary heist film where the perpetrators suffer the consequences of defiance, three cohorts becoming fish fodder trying to recover the stolen jools in a nearby lake. Criminal mastermind James Franciscus remains behind due to a bad ticker, plays endless games of backgammon, and plants his favorite species of quick spawning piranha to guard against thieves in the night until the waiting period of 60 days is up. The combination of R-rated gore, brief nudity, and satirical content was enough to make Joe Dante's "Piranha" one of the few "Jaws" ripoffs to come close in audience appreciation, but this decidedly lesser effort is utterly humorless, free of nudity in its sanitized PG presentation, and lacking in bite with a nondescript cast of vacuous pretty faces sinking just 200 yards from shore. Houston Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini went the way of Terry Bradshaw, Joe Kapp, and Joe Theismann in his brief attempt at a movie career (as one of the thugs who gets devoured for his trouble), only James Franciscus and Karen Black fully committed to their cliched roles, Lee Majors a stone faced lead making a half hearted attempt to save the gems (in the end, the culprits never get caught). As a supposed horror film it's a total flop, perhaps only worthy of late night viewing when insomniacs fear the worst.

This movie mixes together two sets of characters at a Brazilian lake-resort: a gang of jewel-thieves fresh from a heist and a company of people involved in photographing a fashion layout. The tensions and turmoils which occur when these two groups come together are not without interest but they create too much clutter. To correct this, some of the characters, (such as those played by Marisa Berenson and Gary Collins), might have been eliminated. A few of the incidents in the first half of the movie might also have been shortened or cut entirely in order to concentrate on the movie's strength -- a long but suspenseful sequence in the last two reels in which a number of people are trapped on a boat which is sinking in the middle of a piranha-infested lake.

At least the clutter provides room for a large and rather bizarrely-diverse cast. Where else can one find, on one marquee, Lee Majors, Karen Black, Margaux Hemingway, Marisa Berenson, James Franciscus, Gary Collins, and Dan Pastorini?

Lee Majors has a brief and disappointingly modest shower scene and James Franciscus gets to take his shirt off for a weight-lifting shot but most of the movie's "beefcake" is provided by 27-year-old football-quarterback Dan Pastorini of the Houston Oilers. There's a scene on his hotel-room bed in which Karen Black examines his bare chest for injuries following a car crash. This scene serves as kind of a warm-up for his appearance, two years later, in a Playgirl Magazine photospread set inside a shower room. While most of these photos showed Pastorini in a wet, filled-to-capacity jockstrap, others featured him in poses which suggest that his position on a football team should not have been "quarterback" but rather "tight end."

The Brazilian backgrounds provide a bit of scenic interest, though not as much as one might wish, and there are some passably-good special effects when a dam breaks, creating a tidal wave of havoc.

Ahhh spaghetti horror with Lee Majors.

A group of American terrorists blow up a Brazilian mining operation, in an attempt to heist a collection of jewels.

They hide their take in a local lake...not realizing the waters are infested with piranha.

Turns out, the man behind the whole operation, seeded the dam with piranha, to prevent anyone from betraying the group.

Now, they're all dying.

And only the most cunning will come away with the booty.

I mean, this is obviously a complete ripoff of Joe Dante's Piranha from the year before...but it's also a bit different, and a little epic- at least in it's vision.

Execution is another story.

The acting is mediocre, at best. And the special effects are bad. So bad at some points, you can almost see the persons hand holding the things in a tank of water. Laughably bad, at least, and reliant upon models that look like fish tank props. Though, they do give the film some of it's charm.

It's the story, which has a lot going on, that saves this from totally sucking.

But it's still pretty bad.

Worth a laugh if anything.

3.5 out of 10.

How do you kill a piranha? Make this movie! This movie is one of the top 6 Mystery Science 3000 masterpieces but that is the only recognition it should receive. This is like a college film student's B+ effort.

After stealing a fortune worth of jewels, a group of thieves hide their stolen loot in a box and throw it into a nearby lake. Proving the adage that "there is no honor among thieves" two of them decide to sneak out to the lake and retrieve it prior to the specified time. What they don't realize is that the mastermind behind the robbery named "Paul Diller" (James Franciscus) put some piranhas in this lake a year or two earlier to protect it from just such an attempt. His plan works as the person attempting to swim toward the box is rapidly consumed. Later, these same piranhas also kill two more thieves as well. But protecting the treasure isn't the only thing Paul has on his mind. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that I found it to be better than I initially thought it would be as it managed to combine elements of a crime caper with that of a horror film along the lines of "Piranha" as well. Of course, having two attractive actresses like Margaux Hemingway (as "Gabrielle") and Marisa Berenson ("Ann") certainly didn't hurt either. In any case, I liked this particular film and have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

I saw this film in a mercifully edited form as an episode of MST3K, but still had to pause it every 10-15 minutes so I could walk around a bit and convince myself to watch the rest. I can't imagine seeing KILLER FISH (even the title is dull) in its original 101-minute form. I would have been, to quote a much earlier MST3K outing, "tohtcha!" (Torture)

Please don't do it with those MST fools. I remember I used to get annoyed when Comedy Central was new & those clowns used to come one. I was always surprised that these got air time, and that there was a segment of the population who enjoyed them. Then I went outside & looked at fellow mankind & out of every 100 people I could see some and realize ok, that's prob some1 who would be into such childish Bs. Yet it's that child who used to do stuff in class that wasn't funny. But was just loud and annoying & disrupting. Why anyone would wanna watch a movie but not really watch the movie, just see picture & hear the dumbest lines put in for them is beyond me. But hey, guess some people have weird fetishes. Who am I to judge. I'm just not gonna understand it.

This movie isn't terrible. But certainly plenty of movies out there to see before I'd recommend getting round to watching this. I'll admit tho, with all these streaming sites I have, I still find myself rewatching older movies for the 2nd, 3rd sometimes 4th or even more for the true classics. Merely cuz I can't find anything knew that looks worth a damn. So if you're desperate, you can give this a try. It will become apparent pretty early on if it's something you could stick round til end for. If you hate lower budgeted movies of the 70's & 80's that are kinda thriller/mystery, or if you hate older movies in general, then Just stay away. I guess 1979 is kinda old now since it's close to when I was born.