Piranha DVD

 

Title-Piranha

SOURCE-Shout Factory DVD

Yea normally I save horror stuff for October. Just after watching this the other night I felt the need to write about it. Now I have covered the 90s remake and the 2000s remake on this blog before. And I've seen  the original many times. 

First time viewing it had to be when it premiered on network tv. Sure it was some channels Movie of the week,who else remembers that? Each major OTA network would have a night of the week where they showed cut for tv versions of big movies. Would be a big deal when stuff like Alien played tv for the first time. I had to be 8 or so when I first saw Piranha and I loved it.

The plot is Jaws but replacing the giant shark with a pile of mutated piranhas. They are heading to a water resort and of course the owner doesn't want to shut it down.

Cheesy and cheaply made this is still the best Jaws rip off from that era. Decent FX work,ok acting and a decent plot.

This DVD is loaded. Got a great commentary,that is full of info on  the film. A almost 20 minute long featurette with Corman and others that worked on  the film. They even dug up the scenes added back into the TV version. Back in the day lots of the time when  a film was edited for tv it would cause the running time to be too short,average movie needed to be 90 to 95 minutes so a 2 hour block would have 25 to 30 minutes of ads,so cut scenes would be added back in. Some films even  had new scenes filmed for the tv version.

I know there is a great blu ray of this out there. Betting a 4k is either out or out soon. This DVD is a great cheap choice if you want to try out the film

Piranha gets a B-.

31 Days of Horror 2022 Day 27 The Wasp Woman (1995)

 

TITLE-The Wasp Woman AKA Forbidden Beauty

SOURCE-DVD-R made from premiere airing on Showtime in 1995

Somehow out of all these mid 90s Roger Corman Theater remakes of older mostly PD films I have seen the 95 Wasp Woman remake,known as Forbidden Beauty in some areas,the most. Saw it when it first aired,cause I had seen and felt disappointed in the original. Then a few years later the remake was rerun on Showtime and a bachelor crash  pad house a buddy owned had myyself and 5 others drinking and watching it and laughing. Then back close to a decade ago when I got this DVD-r rip of a VHS recording ,in SP on a good HIFI VCR,of the original TV airing I watched it again. Then today. 

Why out of the 5 or so of these remakes I own is this one I go back to often? Mostly cause the others are remakes of films I already enjoy. But that original Wasp Woman,that is in the top 5 movies I own the most copies of on DVD thanks to it being PD in an in every multipak of horror,is a boring as hell crap fest of a film. We get right at 4 minutes tops of Wasp Woman in the film. This remake while having soome dodgy FX at least gives us plenty of the title creature.

The remake also has Jennifer Rubin,who uses a very very obvious body double for the nudity in her sex scene,and Maria Ford. And this is Maria after she had some visits to the plastic surgeon. That original I can't tell you who anyone in the cast is. Hell the remake has Fred Olen Ray as the higher up that tells Rubin she is an old hag. 

Directed by Jim Wynorski,this remake is the perfect example of how to reamake and improve an old horror flick. Now is it a undiscovered modern classic of horror? Hell NO! But it is a fun mid 90s Creature Feature that should be seen by more people. It is perfect for streaming on say Tubi or Amazon Prime. And for all I know it could be on one of those.

The Wasp Woman gets a B-

31 Days of Horror 2021 Day 09 The Terror

 

TITLE-The Terror

SOURCE-DVD-R from an airing on Elvira's Movie Macabre 2010

There is so many horror films in the public domain. And by 2010 I was pretty sure I had seen all of them. Then late one weekend night on the revival of Elvira's Movie Macabre she showed The Terror. Sure for years I had heard a bit about this film. How it had 5 directors. And was made of leftover sets from Roger Corman's The Raven. I sat there at 3am watching it and being half asleep and how disjointed the film is made it into this odd experience.

Months later the episode was reran and I recorded it to a DVD-R. Thinking that these episodes wouldn't get a DVD release. They did but since I had recorded every episode I only bought the DVDs that had unaired episodes.

Skip ahead 11 years. I've been slowly thinning my DVD collection. Found a box that was full of stuff I had recorded in the 2 years I had my dvd recorder hooked up to the Satellite. Saw The Terror and threw it in to listen to/watch while I did stuff around the house. But maybe 10 minutes into the film the oddness of the film had captured my full attention.

Set back in 1806 The Terror has Jack Nicholson as Andre Duvalier. A soldier who got lost when fleeing a battle. He meets up with a woman. Who looks a lot like a local Baron's wife. A wife who died a few decades ago. Andre and Dick Miller,as Stefan,team up and capture a local witch. Who they believe is behind a bunch of stuff.

But nope PLOT TWIST. The Baron is actually someone named Eric.Eric is the son of the witch. Seems Eric was having an affair with the Baron's wife. And after the Baron died Eric took over his identity. In the 20 years that have passed Eric has convinced himself he is the Baron.

Yea it sounds way  way complicated and it is. But what do you expect from a film that has 5 directors,maybe 6. It started off with 60 pages of script and 2 days to film. The first director is Roger Corman. And all the scenes with Boris Kaloff as the Baron where filmed in those 2 days.

 3 months later Corman hired Frances Ford Coppola,since Corman was in the Union and Coppola wasn't. Coppola went out to the Big Sur area of California. Used a bunch of film students from UCLA and filmed for 11 days. 

On to the third director.This was Dennis Jakob,a friend of Coppolas. Jakob filmed for 3 days and Jakob ended up being a stand in for Kaloff in a few scenes.

Monte Hellman was the 4th.He filmed for 5 days.Hellman filmed in two locations,Santa Barbara and Palos Verdes.It was during this time that Jack Hill was brought in to rework the script. Which caused a change in the film's plot. According to Hill and Hellman lots of what Coppola filmed was throw out.

This leads to Jack Hill being the 5th director. This was almost a year after the first stuff was shot. Corman claims that Hill had to leave before he finished filming and Jack Nicholson filmed the last day of filming. Hill says that it was Corman that filmed that day. Who knows really.

Corman took what these 5 or 6 directors filmed.Cut it all together and decided that some reshoots were needed. And during the reshoots is when the plot twist of Eric pretending to be the Baron was added.

Sure the film is odd and feels very disjointed. And even after seeing it a few times I wasn't sure of all of the plot. But it is a great looking film for how low budget it is. And it is a film that any one with even a little interest in film history should see at least once. I'm sure you can find The Terror on Youtube and the Internet Archive.

The Terror gets a C+.

2016 Comic Challenge 285 Caged Heat 3000 #01

TITLE-Caged Heat 3000 #01
PUBLISHER-Roger Corman's Cosmic Comics

For a short while in 1995 Roger Corman,the infamous low budget producer and director of 100s of b-films,has his own comic company. I remember seeing the ads,but never saw any of the comics in any shop. Found the above pictured issue at a con for cheap.

Based on the Caged Heat 3000 film,this comic tells the story of an all woman's prison that is out in space on a asteroid.

Some kind of space nun with all kinds of mental powers shows up. Right around the time a trouble maker,who has just murdered another inmate,is being sent to solitary. The space nun enters her mind,and we get hints that the space nun isn't on the side of good.

The rest of the issue is packed with what you would expect from a Corman Women in Prison film. Shower scenes,and lots of fights. Fights that of course include hair-pulling and clothing being ripped.

I might have to track down the next two issues,if they even came out,to see how this story ends. Cause even though the art isn't anything special the idea of space nuns and a female prison has potential.

Caged Heat 3000 #01 gets a borrow.

31 Days of Horror 2015 Franchise review Piranha

A few years ago I did short reviews of every film in various horror franchises. And to me a film has to have at least 4 films to be a franchise. So I was thinking "What is a franchise I don't hear lots of talk about?" And after realizing not only I don't want to re-watch all 13 entries in the Witchcraft franchise,I also only own about half of them. Then a few days ago I got ahold of a film that I had forgotten about. Yep got the mid 90s remake of Piranha.

Starting in 1978 with the Roger Corman produced Jaws rip off. Piranha now has a total of 5 films in the series.

The first one I saw years ago late at night on one of the local UHF channels. Where genetically engineered WAR piranhas get released.And they end up in a water resort where carnage happens.

Going back a few years ago when Shout Factory released a great DVD of this film I found it really fun and entertaining. It is very much a 70s low budget horror. But I love that type of film.

3 years later in 81 a sequel hit the silver screen. Directed by James Cameron,in what was his first theatrically released film.Besides some flying piranhas,yeah they can fly in this one. The FX work is decent.But truthfully this is the worst film in the franchise. Just proving to me once again unless he is ripping off old episodes of Outer Limits,that Cameron is a hack and one of the most over rated directors of the past 100 years.

And now we are up to the film I just finally got a copy of. Back in the mid to late 90s Showtime had a weekly Roger Corman Presents show. Where each Saturday you got a new Corman produced film. Really this is pretty much a straight remake of the late 70s original. But it has a neat cast. You got William "Greatest American Hero" Katt,Alexandra"Christine" Paul,Soleil Moon Frye AKA Punky Brewster and in her debut role Mila Kunis. Yeah I was surprised when I saw her. Doing some research it seems this did get a DVD release that is out of print.

In 2010 Piranha was remade for a second time. This time in 3D. And what a fun film this is. You get right at 1 1/2 hours of hot women,gore and a dash of comedy. This time it is set during Spring break in a town on the edge of a huge lake. The cast is pretty fun. You got the almost always good Elizabeth Shue. Christopher Lloyd pretty much playing his Doc Brown role from Back to the Future.And Jerry O'Connell as a sleazy as fuck Girls Gone Wild director.

Then in 2012 we got what as of this post the last film in the franchise. Piranha 3dd,which from what I can find got a very limited theatrical release. And I can see why. This movie is kind of a mess. It uses any excuse to show boobs or blood. And besides David Hasselhoff playing himself the rest of the cast is crap. This and the Flash TV show are what proved to me that Danielle Panabaker lost all her acting talent once she grew up.