For our final installment of the movie poster segment of our 31 Days of Scares, we’re taking a look at the Piranha films through the years. I haven’t decided whether or not I like the Piranha franchise yet. I can best describe my feelings toward it with an excerpt from R. Kelly’s “Bump n’ Grind” — “My mind is tellin’ me no, but my body is tellin’ me yes.”
Piranha (1978)
The original Piranha poster leaves everything to the imagination, because hardly any of it is in the actual movie. There is no giant piranha attacking ladies on rubber rafts. There are a lot of ladies, and there are a few rubber rafts involved in the film, but the part where the piranhas either, A) took a step back and allowed their giant patriarch to devour people, or B) all Megazord’ed together to form one massive piranha, was left on the cutting room floor. Also, I’m taking B as my own idea, if no one else calls it.
Piranha 2: The Spawning (1981)
The child that James Cameron hid under the stairs, Piranha 2: The Spawning, is often forgotten, mainly because it’s terrible. I know that genetically modified piranha, in theory, should be the best thing in the world, but leave it to James “My 3-D Is The Best 3-D” Cameron to suck the fun out of a killer fish movie. He made Terminator 2! He should be better than this.
This first poster doesn’t give away the fact that the piranha are given the ability to fly in the movie. In fact, the only thing that seems weird about this poster is that the artist seems to be perfectly adept at drawing piranha, but completely unable to draw anything but human eyes. This causes all of the fish to look like angry drunks.
The second poster totally gives away the twist that the fish are now airborne, and it’s better for it. The poster is 10 times more exciting than the film, and 5 times more exciting than the entire series as a whole. Also, at the bottom, it reads “Flying Killers.” Why isn’t that the name of the movie? Piranhas spawn all the time. That’s what most fish normally do.
Piranha 3D (2010)
This poster is the first to tell us about the prior work of the people that made the movie, though it’s a pretty futile effort. I can safely assume that the people who brought us The Hills Have Eyes remake and 300 would feel pretty good about doing a Piranha movie. I’d never check the credits of one of these and be surprised when I couldn’t go back and tell my friends about how good Ingmar Bergman’s Piranha In Autumn was.
Piranha 3DD (2012)
Based entirely around a boob joke, the latest Piranha offering takes a lady, puts her close up, and then surrounds her with piranha, who aren’t really attacking her. They just ogle her body, and prove that, sometimes, Photoshop might not be your best option.
Overall, I vote Piranha 3D as the best of these films. The original Piranha is pretty awesome, but Piranha 3D’s blaring, garish soundtrack puts it over for me. It’s the first Piranha soundtrack that I really feel comfortable taking shots to, and when you’re playing “Drink every time Eli Roth says a slang term for ‘breasts’,” that’s what’s really important.
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