The project was canceled after the war ended, but the mutant specimens survived and Hoak tended to them to salvage his work. Robert Hoak, lead scientist of a defunct Vietnam War project called Operation: Razorteeth, which involved genetically-engineering a ravenous and prodigious strain of piranha that could endure the North Vietnamese rivers' cold waters and inhibit Viet Cong movement. She and Grogan are skeptical until they come across the corpse of Grogan's friend Jack. The next day, as the three travel downriver, the stranger tells the pair the pool was filled with a school of piranha and McKeown released them into the river. The man awakens and steals their jeep, but crashes due to being disoriented and is taken to Grogan's home. The pair find a skeleton in the pool's filtration trap and learn it was filled with saltwater. Locating a drainage switch for the nearby pool, McKeown empties it to search the bottom, but a haggard man enters and tries to stop her until Grogan subdues him. They discover the compound and find bizarre jarred specimens and evidence of an occupant inside. Sometime later, determined yet absent-minded skiptracer Maggie McKeown is dispatched to find the missing teenagers near Lost River Lake and hires surly backwoods drunkard, Paul Grogan, to guide her. Two teenagers find an abandoned military compound and skinny dip in a holding pool, but are attacked and killed by an unseen force. Piranha was followed by a sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), and two remakes, one in 1995 and another in 2010, which spawned its own sequel in 2012. Released on August 3, 1978, the film was a commercial success and later became a cult film. Initially, Universal had considered obtaining an injunction to prevent Piranha being released, particularly as they had released Jaws 2 the same summer, but the lawsuit was dropped after Spielberg himself gave the film a positive comment in advance. It tells the story of a river being infested by lethal, genetically altered piranha, threatening the lives of the local inhabitants and the visitors to a nearby summer resort.Įxecutive produced by Roger Corman, Piranha is the first installment in a series of low-budget B movies inspired by the film Jaws (1975), which had been a major success for Universal Pictures and director Steven Spielberg. The film stars Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele and Dick Miller. Piranha is a 1978 American comedy horror film directed and co-edited by Joe Dante from a screenplay by John Sayles, based on a story by Richard Robinson and Sayles.
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