#38. Piranha (1978)

DVD Synopsis: While searching for missing teenagers, novice skip tracer Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) and local town boozer Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) stumble upon a top-secret Army laboratory conducting genetic research on piranha fish for the purpose of developing biological warfare. When the deadly eating machines are accidently released from the compound, they're soon headed downstream and consuming everything, and anything, in their path.

Produced in 1978 by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, Piranha was to be little more than a low-budget thriller that would capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which broke box-office records a few years earlier. 

But with the likes of Joe Dante directing and John Sayles penning its script, Piranha would go far beyond simple exploitation to become a thrilling bit of entertainment in its own right. 

Like Jaws before it, the tension in Piranha is generated primarily by the film's attack scenes. However, since the title characters spend all of their time under water - thus almost entirely out of sight - the filmmakers had to develop a signal to let the audience know that these deadly creatures had arrived. 

Spielberg addressed this same problem in Jaws with the help of composer John Williams, whose sinister score is still one of the most recognizable in cinematic history. 

In Piranha, the warning system was much less... subtle. 

Instead of music, Piranha relies on the sound of gnashing teeth, as if the title creatures' lethal mouths were in a constant state of motion. While It may not be as memorable as the Williams score, that foreboding, ravenous chomping generates just the right amount of anxiety. 

Piranha had no business being this entertaining; the reason it existed in the first place was the quest for the almighty dollar. Fortunately for us, there were too many talented people involved with the making of Piranha for it to have been anything less than a hell of a lot of fun.