When I say the words “Pirahna remake”, most people at the bus stop look at me with a mixture of alarm and concern; however, if I said the words in context, you would most likely conjure up vision of Alexandre Aja’s tits and teeth redo that employed the third dimension to gory and goofy effect back in 2010. However, what if I told you that there was another remake that was made for the Showtime Network back in 1995 and that it featured the penny pinching oversight of legendary producer, Roger Corman?
While Corman’s notorious habit of impressively cutting corners in order to keep costs down had both schooled numerous Hollywood heavyweights in the ways of maximizing a budget, it also lead to some devastating acts of cheapness that has to be seen to be believed.
Take my word for it, Piranha 1995 is a prime example.
After a couple of braindead teens stumble upon a closed down government research centre located halfway up the side of a mountain and think it’s a stunning idea to just dive the fuck into a random pool they happen to find there, they are quickly gobbled up by the results of Project: Razorteeth – a military experiment to create a breed of super piranha. While the loss of these two dumbasses is hardly a blow to the future of America, the bra-resistant girl turns out to be the niece of blustering fat cat, J.R. Randall who hires gutsy private eye, Maggie McNamara, to track her down.
During her search, she stumbles across Paul Grogan, a former hotshot lawyer who since was disgraced and now lives a reclusive life sucking on bourbon and failing to write the next, great American novel and after some lifeless banter, he agrees to help her search. They eventually come across the research centre and after a brief lookyloo, Maggie decides to drain the pool just in case her quarry has drowned, butvas the water runs away, they are attacked by Dr. Letitia Barnes who is horrified that the Piranha have now escaped into the local river system and are now free to eat and breed like the average cast of a season of Jersey Shore.
Rafting down the river, Paul, Maggie and the scientist follow in the bloody wake of the voracious appetite these killer fish possess in the hope that they can get to a point where they can stop their progress before their rampage causes more havoc.
Slowing their roll is the actions of the greedy J.R. who has sunk all of his money into a brand new resort and he isn’t about to let some random claims of killer fish ruin his grand opening, but there’s an even greater problem – standing between the resort and the Piranha is a scout camp just by the river which contains none other than Susie, Paul’s aquaphobic daughter! Best get your skates on, then.
If the above synopsis sounded weirdly overfamilar to you, that’s because the cost cutting nature of Roger Corman truly knows no bounds. Less an intelligent and more like a shot for shot retread, this thoroughly unnecessary cash-in is a stunning example of how you can still manage to make a film with no artistic merit whatsoever. For example, aside from a few tweaks here and there (some gender swapping and the odd simplifying of events), the movie simply takes John Sayles’ incredibly witty script for the original and simply strips any semblance of humour or tongue-in-cheek intelligence away with the mindless ferocity of the titular fish stripping a human thigh to the bone. The reasons why you would take a perfectly awesome cult movie and go out of your way to deliberately make it worse is beyond me, but that’s exactly what the filmmakers have done and the rest of the people involved dutifully follow suit.
William Katt has always been a likable sort, whether hanging 10 in Big Wednesday or avoiding spooks in House, but here he goes over the work of of previous Paul, Bradford Dillman, and attacks it with all the enthusiasm of a man who has just woken up from an eight year coma. Taking over the role of Maggie from an impossibly bubbly Heather Menzies is Alexandra Paul, who really should know better than to tangle with aquatic situations considering her Baywatch character died when a boat’s mast fell on her and subsequently drains all the character out of her role just as much as Katt. The rest of the cast – including a startlingly embryonic Mila Kunis – do the bare minimum to get their various character traits across (greedy, stupid, nude, etc.) while trying to play dialogue like, “I never meant to kill anyone – this was for science!” bewilderingly straight.
The Piranha franchise has had quite the varied list of directors over the years with such talents as Joe Dante, Alexandre Aja, John Gulager and even James Cameron (with an unwanted assist from Ovideo Assontis) rolling up their sleeves and wrangling the murder fish to do what they do best, Scott P. Levey – director of such “gems” as Midnight Tease and National Lampoon’s Men In White – turns in a style flatter than a stingray and worse yet, even reuses all the Piranha attack footage from the first movie to avoid having to do extensive effects work. That’s right, these Pirahna can survive in all types of water, squeak like dolphins (for some reason) and recycle special effects work wholesale in the desperate effort to save a buck. To the uninitiated, you probably not notice a thing, but to those who know, it’s nothing short of an (admittedly innovative) offence that even has actors dressing like victims from seventeen year prior in order for the footage to match up. Could you imagine if The Fly had done that, or The Thing?
And still the remake trundles on, copying the 1978 version’s greatest bits with no sense of style or fun whatsoever – the bit with the divers, the bit with the water skier, the attack on the scout camp; they’re are all reworked in a way that proves to be as exciting as Joe Biden reading out a bus time table.
As it progresses, you start to sense that Piranha is less a functioning movie and more an elaborate con job where, at the end, you finally realise that it’s actually you who’s the mark and you’ve been callously scammed out of 87 minutes of your life you could have spent being more productive – like taking an extra satisfying shit, or clearing your sinuses.
It’s a rare aquatic horror movie that manages to make you less afraid of the water, but this version of the cult classic manages it without even trying.
Less a remake, more a regurgitation.
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