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| PIRANHA (1978) |
I loved drive-in theaters and the cheap, trashy films that often played there – usually melodramatic revenge dramas, car-chase thrillers and rip-offs of high-profile, big-budget movies from major studios.
By the mid- to late 1970s, the spate of “Exorcist” clones significantly slowed. In its place came a series of “Jaws” rip-offs that saw fair to middling success from people hungry for the same thrills and scares they experienced when they saw the 1975 Steven Spielberg classic.
“Grizzly” led the way in 1976 with its story of an 18-foot rampaging grizzly bear. The next year saw “Tentacles,” about a killer octopus, and “Tintorera,” about a killer tiger shark. Then, in June 1978, the sub-par sequel “Jaws 2” hit screens.
My favorite is a small film that opened in drive-ins and second-run houses in August 1978. Joe Dante’s “Piranha” belongs to the class of films that are so pathetically bad, so poorly acted, so horribly directed that they instantly become a classic unequaled in cinema history.
