Killer Fish

source: Killer Fish

Director Antonio Margheriti ("Take a Hard Ride") guides this amusing diversion. Yes, it's true that Joe Dantes' "Piranha" from the previous year was a better film to feature these fish, but this is fun exploitation. Provided the viewer doesn't take it too seriously, they can enjoy it. It's filmed on location in Brazil and certainly looks quite nice. It also hits the ground running with a decent action set piece. The piranha attack scenes are actually pretty good once we get to actually see them. The cast is variable, but some of the actors come off well enough. A team of professional thieves pulls off a daring heist of millions of dollars worth of jewels, then deposit the loot in a dam for retrieval six months later. However, greed takes over, and some team members try to obtain the jewels early, thereby becoming aware of the danger. There are piranha in this water! While betrayal among the group takes place, a photo shoot with model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway, "Lipstick") is on location, and several of the characters end up stranded on a tour boat thanks to a storm that also destroys the dam. Lee Majors is at his charisma-free worst as our tougher than tough hero, who in one hysterical moment gets so mad at James Franciscus (playing mastermind Paul Diller) that he jumps into the water and swims towards him, regardless of what's in the water with him. Karen Black is commanding and sexy, as is Marisa Berenson. There's a number of familiar faces in this cast: Gary Collins as Tom the pilot, Anthony Steffen as Max, football player Dan Pastorini as Hans, Frank Pesce as Warren, and Roy Brocksmith as corpulent fashion photographer Ollie. The scene with Ann and Ollie on the makeshift raft is ridiculous enough to induce head shakes. There's a fair bit of blood here, but not much gore, and no skin in this diverting exploitation nonsense. The twist ending adds to the overall entertainment. Seven out of 10.

Killer Fish is yet another Jaws inspired horror flick from the late 70's. Set in South America, it's about thieves who steal a box of diamonds and then throw it into a lake in order to hide them. The plan is to retrieve the booty once the heat dies down but unfortunately it turns out the lake is infested with piranhas making retrieval of the stolen goods a little tricky. Distrust and betrayal quickly set in amongst the thieves. This flick was directed by Antonio Margheriti who was a prolific but fairly middling Italian director responsible for the likes of Naked You Die (1968). This flick was obviously one of the many water-based horror flicks from the time but for the first two thirds of the movie it's more-or-less a crime film. The piranhas of the title take a while to get involved and it's only towards the end that we actually see them. But once a dam breaks and the killer fish are set loose around the surrounding area, the movie moves more squarely into horror territory. The cast isn't too bad all things considered. We have the cheesy Lee Majors in the ostensibly good guy role. The interesting Karen Black is one of the thieves torn between Majors and the brains behind the gang, James Franciscus. Black and Franciscus are better actors than Majors and have more interesting parts. It maybe could be argued that Killer Fish tries to do too much by being a hybrid crime/horror film. And maybe its focus can get a bit lost but it is a decent time-filler and is fairly well made and acted. It's pretty low-budgeted but there is some decent model work and effects in the opening power-plant assault mission as well as the dam bursting sequence. Of additional note, there is a rather hilarious scene where a fat photographer gets eaten by the piranhas – for some reason the group thinks it would be best to send out the only clinically obese member of the team on a pathetically flimsy raft first as a try out. Needless to say that idea ends in tears.

When jewel thieves stash their loot at the bottom of a lake in Brazil belonging to a man named Paul Diller (James Franciscus - "Concorde Affair"), he finds out about it and decides to stock the lake with Red-Bellied Piranha, those vicious razor-sharp toothed killers found in the Amazon River to stop anyone from recovering the jewels. As it turns out, the stolen jewels - emeralds and diamonds - actually belong to him and if he can't have them, he quickly decides that no-one can! When one man tries to recover the jewels, he is devoured by the fish. Along the way, his Brother and a scuba diver too fall victim to the Piranha. It is at this point that Kate Neville (Karen Black - "Airport 1975"), one of the group of thieves, discovers that Paul is the one responsible for the lake being filled with Piranha after herself and Lasky (Lee Majors - TV's "The Six Million Dollar Man") witness one of the attacks and she runs to Paul's château and see's that he has many tanks of the Red-Bellied Piranha. She tells no-one else, but they find out soon enough when many others fall prey to the fish and it soon becomes a race against time as Kate and Paul must team together to recover the stolen jewels and avoid becoming fish food for the Piranha. Meanwhile, some guests at the lake, who are doing a magazine photoshoot also become involved in the Piranha attacks. Beauty Model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway - "Lipstick") and her agent Ann (Marisa Berenson - TV's "Sins") and photographer Ollie (Roy Brocksmith - "Psycho") encounter the Piranha during the film's climax when they all attempt to make it to shore after a tornado hits their boat on the lake and shipwrecks them on the rocks while the Piranha swarm around the damaged boat. The film reaches a thrilling and twisting sequence at this point when everyone fights for survival and tries to make it onto shore with a share of the jewels for themselves. Some win, some loose, but either way, it's an edge-of-your seat action-packed finale!

I saw this movie yesterday. I liked the beginning. A couple of jewelery-thiefs carries out a plan to steal some jewels near a powerplant and a barrage. They succeed to steal them and also avoid getting caught when "escaping". They hide the bait in a preplanned secret place for them to recover later on. So far so good. In this part of the movie i thought that "yes! this could be a quite a good/exciting/thrilling movie to watch.." But when they gather together afterwards, a "new" twist in the plot appears or comes up to surface. One member of the company has already planned a deceiving backstabbing plan to get hold of the treasure alone. And how that is done and carried out in the movie is where I get a bit disappointed. I don't gonna say how, but the realism in that plan is far from reliable. It's quite dull how it is carried out and how the actors acts/behaves in that part of the movie. As the title of the movie claims, there is a human threat in the movie called as we all know "piranhas". Small and dangerous predators. But I don't like how they are described in the movie. Of course they can be dangerous to other mammals and us humans, but they don't attack that easily in real life as in the movie. For what I have learned blood and hunger triggers an attack. With that in mind you can wonder how in h-ll they can attack people so easily as in this movie and will they not ever stop being hungry for one single moment!!!?? They just keep attacking and attacking. I'm not gonna let out all details in this movie, I stop here. However this movie does not s-ck totally. it has some tense/exciting moments but you will probably get bored out quickly. At least i did. I Grade it 4/10.

The famously bad low-budget Brazillian import isn't so bad after all. Centers on a group of diamond thieves in South America who, after blowing up a big outpost during the opening credits and nabbing a cache of jewels, hides the goods in a lake that becomes inhabited by killer fish i.e. piranha, all pets of shady millionaire James Franciscus to weed-out any takers. A couple of the thieves are killed attempting a premature recovery and because of this, Lee Majors and Karen Black, both leaders of the heist, are pitted against each other: Black joins with Fransiscus and beautiful Margeaux Hemingway, as a fashion model on a location-shoot, beds the Bionic Man. Eventually a boat is stuck in the inhabited lake and the surviving cast attempts to get ashore without becoming piranha burgers. The special effects are pretty bad - the piranha looking like soup crackers on underwater strings... people fall into the water, scream, sink, and red-die rises... the music is pornoesque, the dialog's corny and badly looped, but on the plus-side, an immanent sense of danger is palpable: whoever goes in the water is gonna die; and for a movie called KILLER FISH, what else matters?

I remember seeing this on British TV around about 1983 or 1984. The reason i mention this is because i had seen Jaws on British TV in the summer of 1981 (it was its premiere) and i remember wishing that i had seen it on the big screen. Jaws is my favourite film of all time. Now back to Killer Fish. I was about seven or eight years old when i first saw this. There are only three things i remember about it. 1. Lee Majors gets a lot of Piranha bite wounds (im a little bit foggy on that one mind). 2. A fat guy who looks like John Candy tries to make an escape by rubber dinghy and gets torn to pieces. 3. And finally, i have always remembered Majors and the rest of the cast being adrift in a sinking cabin cruiser out on a lake somewhere. I always mind the boat sinking more or less the same way that The Orca vessel sunk in Jaws. Turns out its another rip-off. But back in the early eighties in Scotland, some families were still unable to afford a VHS so the TV was what you had to make do with.... ....as was these type of B Flicks!

i am 32. i first saw this on TV in the UK about 18 years ago and thought it was basically a mess. A few years later after smoking something, it was on TV again and i can honestly say i have never seen myself or my friends laugh as hard. It is without doubt one of the most stunning examples of why lee majors should be shot dead. The man is an imbecile if he thought that he could forget about this one. To be completely honest i kind of feel sorry for the guy, he's obviously not right in the head. To his credit though, i did manage to get a copy of it on ebay for about £40 such was my fascination with the whole thing, so maybe he knew what he was doing. I doubt it though. 4 years later, I still feel the same

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

I love this movie!!! We are talking "double cheese" here 1970's style. I saw this film many years ago on TV - I was a huge fan of Lee Majors in the "Six million Dollar man" - and it was great to see him in action taking on Jewel thieves/sexy models and Nasty killer fish in this low budget gem. The Brazilian background is really cool along with the 1970's fashions. The theme song performed by disco Diva Amii Stewart is catchy and the overall acting is ridiculously fun !! You don't get to see the actual killer fish very much but this only adds to the overall tension of the picture. A funny scene where "Ollie" - the fat photographer who gets eaten by the Piranha fish is really hilarious and a classic B Movie sequence. I am now a proud owner of the film on DVD and it stands proudly in my collection of B movie killer fish movies