Piranha (1978) on Netflix
Skip tracer Maggie McKeown hires guide Paul Grogan to find two missing teenagers near Lost River Lake. At an abandoned military compound, Maggie drains a pool, releasing piranhas into the river.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb5.9/1028,496 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
Skip tracer Maggie McKeown is sent to Lost River Lake to find two missing teenagers. She hires Paul Grogan, a surly backwoods drunkard, as a guide. They discover an abandoned military compound with bizarre jarred specimens. Maggie finds a drainage switch for a holding pool and empties it. A haggard man enters and attempts to stop her, and Paul subdues him. The man steals their jeep, crashes, and is taken to Paul's home. The next day, the stranger tells them the pool held a school of piranhas that Maggie has released into the river.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Piranha (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Days before shooting, executive producer Roger Corman cut Piranha's budget from $900,000 by $200,000 to give the money to Avalanche instead. Preoccupied with that film, Corman never visited the set and did not know who was in the cast until he saw the final cut.
- Universal considered an injunction to stop Piranha being released, since it had put out Jaws 2 the same summer, but the suit was dropped after Steven Spielberg praised the film in advance.
- Eric Braeden was originally cast as Dr. Hoak but pulled out after a few days of filming. An underwater sequence he had already shot before leaving was kept in the finished film.
- Effects artist Phil Tippett built 76 rubber piranhas and four with metal teeth for close-ups in just four weeks, while Chris Walas and Rob Short made the prosthetic limbs the fish tear into.
- Because stop-motion piranhas were unaffordable, producer Jon Davison settled for a stop-motion bipedal, fish-headed hybrid in Dr. Hoak's lab, inspired by Ray Harryhausen's Ymir. Davison built the armature, which Tippett later reused on the 2021 film Mad God.
