SlashBack Cinema
Technically a horror podcast. Actually, a time machine. Remember the video store horror section? The sleepover dares? The practical effects that grossed us out? SlashBack Cinema is two Gen X dads going back — humor, nostalgia, trivia, and the scenes, memories, and VHS-era oddities that made them unforgettable
SlashBack Cinema
Piranha (1978): This Movie Bites! Killer Fish and Summer Camp Chaos + Retro Trivia
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This week on SlashBack Cinema, we head into the water with Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) the scrappy Jaws-inspired cult classic where genetically engineered killer fish turn a quiet river into an all-you-can murder buffet. Ryan and Shanny break down the fishy action, the wild B-movie energy, and why this cult favorite still bites.
Special guest Jeff Wilson joins the conversation, and we wrap things up with another round of 80s retro trivia to test your VHS-era memory.
The deadliest man eaters of all in schools of hundreds, they attack and devour anything that moves with razor, sharp teeth that can strip a man to the bone in less than a minute.
Ryan Dreimiller:It's summer at the lake, which means summer camp, lazy afternoons and
Shanny Luft:mutant piranha eating their way through pre teen campers like it's an all you can murder buffet.
Jeff:This week, we're diving into 1978 piranha, the movie that dared to ask, What if jaws but small?
Shanny Luft:Does piranha hold up after 30 years? I mean, 40 years? I mean, holy crap. Has it been almost 50 years since 1978
Ryan Dreimiller:this movie has everything a mad scientist spontaneously exploding boats and a military breeding program for monsters.
Jeff:And stick around, because after the conversation, we'll test your Gen X brain with another round of Piranha inspired trivia.
Shanny Luft:This is slash back cinema. That voice you're hearing is Jeff. Jeff. You want to introduce yourself. Hi.
Jeff:I'm Jeff Wilson, graduate school. Friend of shanny's been listening to the podcast since it started, taking me back to all the wonderful, trashy movies that I grew up watching, and so been really enjoying the nostalgia. Happy to be with you.
Shanny Luft:Thanks so much for coming. Jeff always gives us feedback on our episodes. He suggested a few movies that we've watched, and so we thought we'll bring you on. You suggested this movie. Was there a particular reason why you wanted to talk about piranha?
Jeff:So there were so many movies that we could have watched, because I've seen so many of them, it makes me really question what I did with my childhood. But when it comes to this one in particular, this is one of the earliest ones I can remember seeing. It's genuinely scarred me. Had effects on my life that were not positive in terms of recreational water sports. So I thought, hey, this is a chance to revisit it and see whether you know, I'm still a scared or so.
Ryan Dreimiller:Had you seen this one since watching it as a younger version of yourself?
Jeff:No, I had never seen this. I watched it once. Like I said, I was about nine years old, and this channel would show all sorts of stuff. And at four o'clock on Saturdays, they would show a Creature Feature, and they showed piranha. This back in the day, you didn't choose you turned on the TV. What was on the TV is what you watched. Well, what was on the TV was piranha. And unfortunately, this meant that whenever the family would go tubing on the river, I was just literally terrified the entire time because of that summer camp scene with all the kids in the tubes and everything.
Shanny Luft:How about you, Ryan, did you ever see this movie before?
Ryan Dreimiller:So I saw pieces of this. I don't know that I've ever seen the whole film, but I distinctly remember those attack scenes where it'd be underwater and there's like that sound effect of, like the high pitch like, and then like blood everywhere. And growing up, I had an irrational fear of quicksand, and then also Piranhas, like, I knew I was gonna get attacked, like and like, clearly, it's from this movie.
Shanny Luft:I don't think I've ever seen this movie. I had seen Jaws, though, and jaws scared me so much as a kid, I was afraid of swimming pools, same it's incredible how these these killer animal movies just traumatized us in ways that I think affected us. Years later, there were dozens of these movies in the 1970s these kill every single animal had a killer animal, Virgin on screen. So Ryan, before we get any further, you want to give us a summary of this masterpiece.
Ryan Dreimiller:Sure. So piranha. 1978 involves a forgotten military experiment, and there's a couple of teenagers that stumble into this facility. The kids go missing. A group of people come looking for them, and they accidentally drain this lake, unbeknownst to them, have released these mutant fish into the water. So military officials scramble to contain this outbreak, and our two protagonists are trying to save the campers before the piranha eat them all.
Jeff:Well, you've got the military is kind of interfering, and kind of a classic 70s 80s, like, can't trust the military, can't trust the media, can't trust the big corporations.
Shanny Luft:The military, in this movie, decides that the way they're going to solve this problem and, like, cover up the piranha thing is they're just going to dump gallons and gallons of toxic chemicals into the waterways. That's the solution. It accomplishes nothing. It doesn't even like, ever get brought up again. It's like, oh yeah, the military just poisoned the water moving right along.
Ryan Dreimiller:It definitely has the 70s vibe. Like, it is just like oozing from this film.
Shanny Luft:Is there a specific moment that you can point to that is like, this is clearly a 70s thing.
Ryan Dreimiller:I, you know, I think it was mostly the fashion that showed up in this film, like the shorts and the shirts and like some of that carried into the 80s. But, you know, all the campers, their outfits that was very quintessential
Shanny Luft:70s shorts were short in those days.
Jeff:Yeah, I would agree about the clothes like. Gap, the kid when he climbs on top the canoe, because the prana is reading his dad and everything, he's wearing overalls. I was like, oh, yeah, I wore overalls throughout, you know, from time I could walk until about grade two or so, were your overalls? Oshkosh? Bagosh, do you guys were and I was sailor. I was thinking myself, am I gonna say Oshkosh bagash on this podcast, that's exactly what they were.
Shanny Luft:Thank you, Jeff for admitting that right before I said it. I thought that can't be really what it was called. Am I going to say this out loud, and it's not going to exist. When I think of Oshkosh bagosh, I think of my brother because he had those overalls as a little kid.
Jeff:Yeah, I have a younger brother. He's exactly two years younger than me, and it is the two of us both being dressed in Oshkosh be Gosh, by our 70s mom running around in the neighborhood.
Shanny Luft:Absolutely, Ryan. So many movies we watch they're funny because they weren't intending to be funny, and so it's like you're seeing a mistake is funny or really poor acting. I actually was incredibly impressed by the acting in this movie, and I want to highlight that. I was delighted to see Dick Miller make an appearance. This is like the fourth time we have talked about Dick Miller on this podcast. If you don't know who that is, and you Google Dick Miller, you do know who that is, you just don't know that's his name. He was in gremlins. One, he was a Gremlins two, he was in Terminator. He's been in a lot of these movies, and so it was quite a thrill to see him again.
Ryan Dreimiller:Yeah, I think Shanny, I mentioned to you that what I love about a Joe Dante film is you always get a side of Dick. Dick Miller, that is,
Shanny Luft:yeah, we might need to do like a dick Miller retrospective, like you could do a podcast just on his life's work.
Jeff:Yeah, he's the original Kevin Bacon. You know, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's really, you know, Dick Miller was the 1.0 here. Yeah, he's in Terminator. He's in Night of the creeps, right? Which you guys did. He's in so many, so
Unknown:many say that word. But the piranhas. What about the goddamn piranhas? They're eating the guest, sir.
Shanny Luft:Thanks. So we've already kind of gotten into it, but this is usually where we talk about film lore. Does anyone have any particular background information that they learned about the movie?
Jeff:Can we talk about the claymation fish monster?
Ryan Dreimiller:That's what I was going to talk about. Yep, go for it,
Jeff:please, Ryan. Don't let me steal your thunder. It's connected
Ryan Dreimiller:to one of my favorite scenes too, because when brain did here that our protagonists, it was Paul and Maggie. They go to this lab trying to find these teenagers, and when they go in, they're exploring the lab, and there's all these weird oddities in the tank. But then that creature shows up, which all of a sudden I was like, what movie and am I watching here? And if there's this little creature in the lab. He's hiding the bookcase, and he's like, walking around. And it was just so weird, like, it just took you out of the film, and you were, like, watching this little guy essentially follow them around the lab. It doesn't last long. It's, it's maybe, like, a minute or two, but and he never comes back. Like, you're just like, what was that? And then reading about it, it sounds like they were really into stop motion, and they wanted this creature to have this much bigger role show up at the end of the film as this giant creature. But I guess their budget got slashed by Robert Roger Corman at the time, so they didn't have the money to do it. But I wish, I wish they would have gone further. That was, like, such a fun little nugget in this film that was, like, totally random.
Shanny Luft:The movie kind of implies they've gone even further with these experiments. It's crazy that the sequels didn't explore that, because that would have been incredible. Ryan, I thought you'd be so excited. You love weird little monster creatures.
Ryan Dreimiller:Well, clearly he was, you could see where, yeah, you were saying. This film, like, gives you a lot of clues on where Joe's head was. Little Monsters, his sense of humor, like his style of filmmaking, it really does show up in this film.
Jeff:It would have been great. I would have loved it if maybe at the end the movie, if they couldn't do a giant one, you know, like Godzilla stomping on Tokyo, if you if you could have, like, they could have gone back into the lab and there's somebody in there sitting in the in the chair, and it swivels around. It's a It's the human size. Now, one, you know, just sitting
Shanny Luft:there, we call for bringing more piranhas with arms and legs. Back from this movie. Any other lore about this movie you learned before we get into some of our favorite scenes?
Jeff:I certainly have more from my own wife that's related to this movie. Yeah. What do you got? Well, it's strange how interconnected I was with this movie that I did not realize until I went and re watched it for one thing. So back in the day, my my grandpa, who lived in Houston, Texas, and this is a film set in Texas, I would go to visit him during the summertime, and he held a bunch of weird jobs back when he was younger. And one of his Jobs was he was an importer of taxidermy piranha. This is a fact. So like he was a tree surgeon, he was a bail bondsman, he was importer of taxidermy piranha. You know, all these sort of, yeah. Standard things that most grandparents have done. And so I'd go down to, you know, to that house down there. And there was one of these Perot it was taxidermy piranha with the mouth open. And it was, you know, like on a little stick with a little stand. So it was there, just in the case, like, and my brother and I were both obsessed with this thing. And after, after he died, the only thing that we wanted, for sure, out of all his stuff was we wanted the taxidermy piranha. But we failed to get it, unfortunately. So that was really kind of, yeah, who does the probe got it? No one will admit it. So, like, you'll go to, you go to family reunions now and say, Okay, who's got, who's got the fish? Everybody will just look around each somebody's got that piranha. And I can't help wondering, did my mother get put through college because of dried piranhas? And then that led to, you know, my own trajectory. I eventually went and got a PhD, like, did we climb the socio economic ladder because of piranha? I do have this outstanding question. This is a
Ryan Dreimiller:foundational movie for you.
Shanny Luft:Yeah, it you're you could have earned your PhD on the backs of piranha.
Jeff:It's possible there is some residual karma from that. So it's really something.
Shanny Luft:So I want to talk about favorite scenes, unless you have any other lore to discuss. Now, let's shift gears. So Ryan, you should go first. What was your do? You have a favorite scene you want to
Ryan Dreimiller:talk about? The one that I'm sure we're all going to talk about it so we can just pile on, is like the resort pole attack, like we were, we watched My Bloody Valentine recently, and we were saying, Oh, this is the highest kill count we've ever seen in a movie. I was watching this film like, Oh my gosh. I believe the estimated kill count in this one is 28 so that's like, somebody getting it every 3.3 seconds in this film. Maybe three minutes, right? Not three. Sorry, yes, three. 3.3 minutes. Thank you for the clarification. But they just did not hold back. I don't think I've seen another film quite go to the level that that they went to in terms of like kids were getting chewed up adults, like it was like blood in the water, like, so just hats off to Joe and team on just they were not scared to step on the gas and just take this one over to the cliff. Really. I
Shanny Luft:love the scene, Ryan, you're absolutely right. There's a point in the movie where they cut to this, like summer camp, and they're not even teenagers. They look like pre teens, 1112, year old kids, and there's like, 40 of them. And I was stunned. I thought, well, they're not gonna kill a bunch of kids, are they? But that is another thing about 70s and early 80s movies, is it was not quite as popular to like kill someone's pet, but holy cow, they did not necessarily shy away from killing kids. You would never see that in a movie today. The thing I noticed about that seed is it's very hard to distinguish the sound of 20 or 30 kids in a lake having fun and 20 or 30 kids in a lake getting eaten by piranha. They're screaming at the same decibel level and intensity.
Jeff:Yeah, it's great, and it's funny that you mentioned the kill count, because if we think back to Jaws, this is this movie. Is a parody of jaws. In Jaws, there's a total of five people in the entire movie who are eaten by the shark. And yet, this is one of the scariest movies, right? It made everybody not want to go in the water. Five people are eaten by the piranhas before they even meet the military in this, in this film, right? And at the end, yeah, that, that final scene, you know, they have a pan back, and there's, there's just dozens of people laid out on, on, on, like, you know, tarps and everything. And some of them may be alive, but many of them are clearly dead.
Shanny Luft:So, yeah, that scene, I mean, hats off. And it's remarkable.
Jeff:Well, and it has several components too, because you got all the people being eaten, you know, and all the chaos going on, but it that same sequence is part of the boat that rams into another boat, and also, at the same time, Maggie and Paul have stolen a police car, and they're jumping like Duke's a hazard type slow mo through the air as they're racing to get Yeah, all these things are combining. It's like peak 70s cheese. It's so great.
Ryan Dreimiller:I feel like he did an incredible job exactly what you said, Jeff. Like tying all together these different moments and building like, just crazy intensity. Some of these older films we watch are like, boy, Chud, that was a slow Movie. This Movie, he was on the gas the whole time, and it was paced really well. You know, at least some of those boat and car chase scenes, they'd sped up the film, but it still worked, like they were, like they were going for it. It was great. Do we have
Shanny Luft:any other favorite scenes? We want to make sure we discuss
Jeff:maybe a few of the funny lines. Here they have this random news guy, and he's like,
Unknown:Lost River Lake, terror, horror, death film in 11,
Jeff:they just cut away from us. That's like, that is like the piranha sensibility, right there. That's Joe Dante. That was great. Yeah.
Ryan Dreimiller:The only other thing I wanted to highlight, because sometimes we'll like, talk about the taglines for these films, and like some of them being so fantastic, I have to say these are some horrible tag lines for this film. It's a hideous death lurked unseen in the river. Dot, dot, dot. They came down river in their 1000s. Their teeth could strip a living man to the bone in seconds. They're here and they're hungry. Lost River Lake was a thriving resort until they discovered dot, dot, dot. They keep going, but they're all like, really bad.
Jeff:They actually have a better one in the movie, because in the movie, every time you see a newspaper, like, every single one has a headline about animals eating people. I don't know if you noticed that, but like, there's the one that says giant rattler bites teen and it also says dogs tear apart newborn baby, but then when they're at the at the military, it says piranhas don't leave many clues, just on the newspaper he's reading that might have been better than any of those weak ones that they actually used.
Shanny Luft:I feel like this movie has not gotten the amount of affection of some other movies that we've seen, like Pumpkinhead, but piranha is, like, genuinely a good movie. Yeah, it's not good. Ironically, it's not good. If you like stupid movies, the acting is decent, the story is decent, the special effects work. It's surprisingly effective.
Ryan Dreimiller:Well, sounds like you're setting yourself up for a stabby score reveal here. Shanny, would you like to segue right into that? And I would propose that it's Piranha Bytes we're talking about today. So out of four Piranha Bytes, Mr. Luft, what would you give piranha?
Shanny Luft:I feel like people who are listening are going to be able to know from my gushing delight of this movie. It's also really fun to discover that a movie is better than you expect it to be, or better than you heard it was. And so between one and four bites for being the best, I'm gonna give Perot a four bites. Wow, incredible, highest level of quality. That's how much I enjoyed this movie, and I watched it twice for the podcast. It gets better when you watch it more. Jeff, how about you?
Jeff:Well, this is my first time. You know, I was thinking before that maybe, you know, like a three, because it's like a B movie. But if we're thinking about it in terms of what it's supposed to be, I could go on with four piranha bites as well. It's basically the Citizen Kane of trashy 70s animal versus Man movies.
Shanny Luft:Yeah, Ryan, is it getting hat trick? What did you feel? You know, don't get influenced by us.
Ryan Dreimiller:I know, I don't want to drag down the party here, but you know, in terms of Perot bites, like this movie has, is high impact. It's got some, you know, high level impact. In terms of, like, sheer body count chaos, it's it definitely delivered beyond my expectations, and it also contributed to my childhood trauma and years of years of fear of being skeletalized. Is that? How you say it by piranha like that was a real fear. Hats off to this film. However, I'm gonna come in at three, three piranha bites. So I think it was a really good film. I'm not gonna put it in the camp of the thing, but, you know, three bites for me,
Jeff:oh, if the thing is our standard, yeah, then maybe I'm like, three bites and some nibbles in that case, but still really, really strong, yeah, yeah.
Shanny Luft:But I like, Jeff's point that, if you think of it in the context of, like, trashy B horror movie, totally, this is, like, the
Jeff:best one. Yeah, it really didn't have a right to be as good as this.
Ryan Dreimiller:You know, did you think that's going to be a was it the National Film Archive that the thing just got pulled up into recently? Do we think Perot is going to land there, guys?
Shanny Luft:I You're joking, but I genuinely think it should be. I think Perot, if you want an example of a great be like cheesy horror movie from the 70s. This checks so many boxes, so I think it should be preserved.
Jeff:Well, you hear, heard it here first, like the campaign to get piranha into the National Film Registry begins with slash back said
Shanny Luft:about, Hey, Jeff and Ryan, I have a question for you guys.
Jeff:Yeah,
Ryan Dreimiller:oWhat's up, man?
Movie clip:shall we play a game?
Jeff:Yes!
Shanny Luft:Ryan's nodding because he's he's just learning that podcasts are in audio.
Ryan Dreimiller:Hey, we've got the video version of this podcast now. I don't have to, like, make any more sounds.
Shanny Luft:So my quiz questions are, none of them are about this specific movie, but they were all inspired, as you'll see, by things I thought about and learned about while watching this movie. As we've talked about several times on this episode, the movie piranha was clearly inspired by Spielberg's original Jaws, which was highest grossing movie of all time, the year that it came out, in 1975 so in Spielberg's original Jaws, a. Local fisherman catches a large Tiger Shark like about halfway into the movie, and so Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfus, they cut open that tiger shark's stomach to see if that shark has is the one that ate a young boy on the beach earlier in the film. So my question to you both is, what do they find inside that shark's body? And I'm giving you three options. You ready? A, do they find the boy's arm? B, do they find a license plate, or C, do they find a Baby shark? What did they cut out of that tiger shark? Was it a boy's arm? Was it a license plate, or was it a Baby shark? You both should text me your answer now,
Ryan Dreimiller:sadly, my jaws memory is a bit fuzzy.
Shanny Luft:So all right, let's see. Wow, impressive. So Ryan, what did you say? The answer was, what did they cut out of the shark?
Ryan Dreimiller:I said it was a license plate. I just went with my first action,
Shanny Luft:and you get a point. It was a license plate, Jeff, I want to give you extra props, because what did you
Jeff:I wrote Louisiana license plate. write?
Shanny Luft:You've actually
Ryan Dreimiller:Wow!
Shanny Luft:where the license plate came from, and it actually is a relevant plot point. Do you remember, Jeff? Why it matters where the license plate from?
Jeff:Hooper, the marine biologist says, Oh, this shark came up from the Gulf Coast, you know, to reach them there and Montauk, and he's, how can you tell that Brody the police fish? And he throws out the Louisiana license plate.
Shanny Luft:And the guy goes, looks at the plate and says, Did he eat a car? All right, so you both get a point. Well done. Question number two, so what animal has killed the most number of people in North America combined over the last 50 years? And you've got three animal options. Which animal killed the largest number of people in North America in the last 50 years combined? Was it sharks? Was it brown bears? Or was it alligators text in your answer now, all right, I got both your answers. Jeff, would you like to say what your answer was? I went with brown bears. And Ryan, what did you say a brown bear? Yeah. And brown bear it was, yeah. The funny thing about it being brown bears is, over the past 50 years combined, brown bears have killed 70 people as many movies as there are about crazy killer animals. The actual number of people that die from these animals is not many, but so well done right now. The score is two to two. But that question actually set up my next question, because we determined that in real life, brown bears kill more people than sharks or alligators. Now I want to ask you, how accurate are those movie depictions? So Jaws came out in 1975 grizzly came out in 1976 and alligator came out in 1980 that's the movie that everybody remembers, because it's about an alligator down in the sewers of New York that was giant. So my question is, Which movie has the most deaths in it is it Jaws, 1975 grizzly, 1976 or alligator, 1980 and I am only counting people deaths. So which one of those movies has the most people killed by the wild animal? I've got Jeff's answer and I've got Ryan's answer. So Ryan, what you go first this time? Which movie has the highest animal kill count.
Ryan Dreimiller:I'm going with the alligator. I don't know that I even saw, I saw that film, but like, I can only imagine what's happening in those sewer tunnels.
Shanny Luft:And Jeff, which one did you say
Jeff:I went with alligator? Another one which I saw when I was too little to watch these things and still remember scenes from
Shanny Luft:and alligator is correct, guys, this is exciting. It is three to three. Here's the last final question to determine. Is it going
Jeff:to be a tie or not? No, boy, I'm sweating. Okay, okay, so it is
Shanny Luft:going to be a number question. I'm going to have you both text me a number. The number you text me that is closest to the actual number will get the point. What if we go over? Are you? It doesn't just closest in either direction. All right. So here's the final question, brown bears, as I talked about earlier in real life, have killed 70 people in North America over the last 50 years? How many people have been killed by sharks in North America in that same time period? Text me your answer. The closest answer to the actual answer wins. Wait, what's the time period again over the past 50 years, just North America, North America. So brown bears 70 in North America. And we already determined earlier, we learned that brown bears have killed more. So you already know it's a number under 70. All right, I got your answers. Totally fascinating, Jeff, you'll go first this time. How many humans were killed by sharks over the past 50 years,
Jeff:actually killed by them. I went, Well, I'm going with four.
Shanny Luft:And then Ryan, what did you say?
Ryan Dreimiller:my initial? Well, I just went with my initial. And then I was like, thinking, I should rewind it, but I just rolled the dice and landed on seven.
Shanny Luft:It's interesting. You guys are way lower than the actual number. So the actual number, keep in mind, this is over 50 years.
Jeff:57 Oh, my God, I'm never going to the beach again.
Shanny Luft:That it's basically about one a year. Wow. Okay, is that a lot? I don't know, but that means that Ryan gets the last point. Once again, Ryan, we have done something where we invite a guest onto our podcast so that you can beat them so they can stop talking about how much better. So Ryan, congratulations. You've almost called you crying for some reason, but you're not crying.
Jeff:Jeff, you're the one who's crying. I underestimated sharks.
Shanny Luft:Jeff, it was an absolute blast to have you on the podcast. We know you've been listening from the beginning. We always appreciate when you email us and give us your thoughts about the episode. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Jeff:Yeah, thanks so much. I really enjoy you guys having me on I'll have to come back at some point, because I got to redeem my honor against Ryan. That wraps up another trip down memory lane. Hopefully you enjoyed revisiting piranha as much as we did. If you're
Ryan Dreimiller:enjoying slash back cinema, please subscribe to the show and rate and review us on Apple or Spotify. It does really help new people find the show. And if you'd like to support us directly, you can donate at the link below in our show notes.
Shanny Luft:And we want to hear from you. If you've got a favorite memory from the 70s ratings, if you've got a classic horror movie you'd like us to dissect, drop us a line at slash back cinema.com Why is that? You ask? Because your suggestions keep the conversation alive.
Unknown:This episode is brought to you by Dr hoax miracle supplement, but a pet that needs a little enhancement, a house plant that just won't stop growing teeth, or a mutant monster hiding on your shelves that needs a little extra love. Dr hoax miracle supplements, results may include aggression, mutation and lawsuits.