The Bloody Pit #57 - KILLER FISH (1979)

JAWS rip-offs were all the rage in the late 1970's. If you were a film producer of any ambition at that time the massive financial take of Steven Spielberg's world wide hit drew your attention. You can almost imagine the conversations in which moneymen demanded their own killer fish film, "script be damned!" And most of those rip-off scripts were damned - damned bad! It's easy to point to a couple of genuinely good descendants of JAWS (PIRANHA and ALLIGATOR ) to claim that high quality was more common in this narrow Danger in the Water sub-genre but the list of terrible efforts far outnumber the impressive. Who has good memories of TENTACLES (1977) , UP FROM THE DEPTHS (1979), ORCA (1977), TINTORERA: KILLER SHARK (1977),  BARRACUDA (1978)  or MAKO: THE JAWS OF DEATH (1976) the clear winner in the 'Not Even Trying to Hide Our Intentions' contest? Really - who? If you have some love for TENTACLES we need to know why!

So where does a film like KILLER FISH (1979) fall on this good/bad scale? As always, merit is in the eye of the beholder so allow John Hudson and I take the opportunity to convince you of our clear-eyed vision as we make the case for Antonio Margheriti's entry in the Pissed Off Fish genre. Given the tag line 'The adventure that drags you in, pulls you under and tears you apart!' the film is obviously trading on the allure of deadly fish munching on human flesh to get bums on seats. But this animal attacks tale throws at least two other genres into the mix to keep the story from becoming too predictable. The film begins with a jewel heist set to the tune of dozens of distracting explosions (cue Margheriti miniatures) and eventually slips in a bit of disaster film silliness to keep things off balance (cue embarrassing funnel cloud special effect). The film is packed with tasty humans known mostly from television stardom including Lee Majors, Karen Black and James Franciscus as well as model turned actor (?) Margaux Hemingway and football player turned guest muscle flexor Dan Pastorini. And what the hell is Gary Collins doing in this film? Anyway .....

Join us as we take a look at another Antonio Margheriti film to see where it fits into his long career. Do the Brazilian shooting locations add to the film's charms? Do the jewel thieves adhere to the code of criminal conduct we expect from all screen no-good-niks? Does Margheriti get the chance to work miniatures into the film on multiple occasions? Is the cool bionic sound effect used when Lee Majors makes out with Margaux Hemingway in the shower? Listen and learn! Or watch the film yourself. That's certainly an option.

If you have any comments or suggestions the email address is thebloodypit@gmail.com where we'd be thrilled to get your thoughts. The show has a FaceBook page where updates are occasionally posted so please check that out. Thank you for downloading and listening - and stay out of the water!

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LEVIATHAN (1989)

For those that were around for the experience 1989 was a strange year for science fiction movie fans. That was the year we got three high profile underwater monster films released all within a few months of each other. This was back in the heady days of producers trying to rush similar films into production to piggyback on the predicted success of a big budget movie that was in the public consciousness. That's how 1982 saw THE SWORD & THE SORCERER in theaters before the highly anticipated CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Well, in cinema the rip-off dollar is a very good dollar so the news of hit maker James Cameron's new project called THE ABYSS sent other studios into a frenzy to find a comparable script and so we got Sean Cunningham's miserable DEEPSTAR SIX as well as this low rent effort.

On the surface LEVIATHAN has everything going for it. It has a decent budget, a talented cast, a tried-and-true plotline and a director coming off a huge hit. Sadly, the one thing they forgot was to locate a good script instead of just any old pile of papers. This film has many faults but almost all of them can be traced back to that sad-ass script. The story is nothing but a transparent combination of chunks of ALIEN and a measure of Carpenter's THE THING mixed with a dash of ...... not much. The film can be summed up (as it is on the IMDb) this way - " Underwater deep-sea miners encounter a Soviet wreck and bring back a dangerous cargo to their base on the ocean floor with horrifying results. The crew of the mining base must fight to survive against a genetic mutation that hunts them down one by one. " In other words, its 'ALIEN meets THE THING underwater' and I'm sure that was how it was sold to the money people to convince them it was going to be a hit in the year of Cameron's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE OCEANIC KIND. It wasn't, making about $15 million which did not return a lot to the investors I'm sure.

I have to be honest and confess that some of that $15 million included a few of my hard earned bucks. Yes, I saw LEVIATHAN in the theater and it certainly sucked in 1989 so why did I sit down and watch the damned thing again? Curiosity, of course. I had not seen this misbegotten mess since '89 and I wondered if the film had aged into something better than I remembered. Long story short - it hasn't!

When I mentioned before that the director (George P. Cosmotos) was coming off a big hit it should be clarified that the film in question was actually made four years before this - RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985) and isn't exactly a cinema classic. In fact, it is one of the dumbest action films of the 1980's but it WAS a huge hit, which is something that you couldn't say about his next film COBRA (1986). Yeah - two shitty Sly Stallone movies in a row with rumors that the star/writer was the real director on both occasions. And knowing the fact that Stallone had COBRA edited down to his less-than-ninety-minutes specifications it would appear that Cosmotos might have been a name hired to fill a slot for some reason other than his skill behind the camera. Hell- the man supposedly didn't even direct the western TOMBSTONE (1993) from what I've read with star Kurt Russell reportedly stepping in to get the moviefinished.

But I'm off track. Where was I? Oh, yeah - LEVIATHAN. The film sucks and among its many crimes is that it wastes one hell of an interesting cast. I mean damn- any film that stars Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern, Amanda Pays, Hector Elizondo and Meg Foster has a solid group of players flexible enough to do almost anything and there are moments when several of them get to shine, especially Weller and Crenna. The film is pretty lifeless with tired situations and relationships coupled with dialog just doesn't have any real snap or a plot with any real drive. That the script is a dog's breakfast seems to have been evident to the cast and it feels like they all knew they were walking through a copy of a better scenario. As I watched the other night I gave up counting the direct rips from ALIEN right about the time I realized I was also counting off rips from THE THING and had gotten the separate counts mixed up. And to add to the offense, its two day after watching the entire film from beginning to end an I can barely remember specific scenes so its not even a fun rip-off. Ugh!