Barracuda (1978) – DVD Review

When you make a film called Barracuda make sure you have the damned animal in it more than a handful of times. For a flick with a kick ass, pissed-off looking demon fish on the cover there sure wasn’t a lot of the aforementioned beast. In fact, after the halfway point I’m hard pressed to think of more than twice that they make an appearance (even though the first half would lead many to believe that there was the potential for some fun feeding frenzies). What a tease.

Rating:

Barracuda starts off with your run-of-the-mill monster attack. Where the better film that this one tries to rip-off (Jaws) succeeds with keeping the beast hidden, Barracuda fails by throwing a swarm of fake barracudas at two swimmers. People start turning up dead in, and around the water of the small fishing community of Palm Cove. Here comes Mike Canfield (Wayne Crawford) as the hero (who really just comes off as a jerk) who’s trying to infiltrate the chemical plant run by Jack (Bert Freed) who just happens to be dumping chemicals into the water. Jack’s henchmen have Mike taken away and don’t mind roughing him up a bit. Mike’s not about to give up, and after cooling off in Sheriff Ben Williams’ (William Kerwin) jail for a while he’s nowhere near done with his quest.

You’d think that the story would fall into the hunt for the creatures (as in Jaws) or a simple story about a chemical plant screwing things up in the environment (as in Humanoids from the Deep), but oh no, Barracuda is not to be satisfied so easily. Turns out there are some things much bigger then what Mike thinks he’s found going on, and anyone that causes a ruckus has to pay. People in the town start ending up dead (which has nothing to do with the killer fish) and Barracuda slips into a full on conspiracy movie (as in Carnosaur).

OK, I mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again, when your title implies that you’re going to have massive fish from hell eating people (or, just implying that there’s a big fish killing people) you better feature the hell out of it. Hell, Jaws actually had the shark on the screen more than the cheesy barracuda puppets were (and the shark was broken most of the time). I’m not saying the barracudas were great, but oh man did they look so stupid you couldn’t help but have a good time. When they attacked it was always a flurry of movement, mouths that never moved yet blood flowed from wounds all over people’s bodies and not once did any of the barracudas move their bodies. I swear, I had no idea that fish could swim without moving. Another hilarious part of the attacks is that the camera would cut away and the shot would change to floating pieces of flesh or a limb that looked so fake that I thought they picked it up at the local costume store.

Once again, I’m coming back to the problem of false advertising, as I seem to have gotten a bit sidetracked with the amazingly awesome completely fake fish. Back to the larger problem at hand, and that is the story. I mean, I can’t really get too pissy about how things turned out, but seriously, they could have used the fish more. Once the middle of the film hits, Mike goes on his underground search for what chemicals are being used and how they’re affecting the water and everything around it. Fine. Go right ahead, but bring back the damned creatures. Oh no, soon enough everything gets really wacky and it starts to feel like an episode of the X-Files. I’d say the first half is a killer animal film and the second half is a conspiracy film where the government is the ultimate bad guy (as usual). They try desperately to use some convoluted scientific mumbo jumbo, which actually makes the film so silly that it becomes even more entertaining (I know there’s some people out there who can’t understand how a bad film could be good, but this film almost falls into that category).

Overall, if you’re a fan of silly movies that feature death by animal or shoot outs in a fishing town, then this might be for you. If you need your films to have a solid structure and characters that develop over the course of the story give it a pass. For me, this film was actually entertaining, and I like both kinds of movies.

EXTRAS:

ADVERTISEMENTS: For anyone that’s ever been to a revival theater and seen an exploitation double feature, you’ll love this. Before the double feature starts a series of sequences that were shown in theaters of yester-year flash across the screen. Really. I’ve never been so hungry for a pizza and hot dog at the same time.

TRAILERS: Several trailers are shown before the films. These are absolutely not for kids (and rock because of it). The films are Bonnie’s Kids, The Centerfold Girls, and Part-Time Wife.

DOUBLE FEATURE: Barracuda is on the same DVD with Island Fury.