Piranha Women Review

PLOT: An experimental new cancer treatment has the side effect of turning women into piranha-human hybrids.

REVIEW: Last year, Full Moon announced that one of their upcoming projects would be a film called Piranha Women, and to promote the concept they released some poster art that showed a trio of women in sunglasses and bikinis skiing – but they weren’t being pulled by a boat. They were being pulled through the water by giant piranha. Of course, now that Piranha Women has actually been made and released, there aren’t any scenes in the movie that are anything like the scene depicted on that poster art. Can you imagine how much it would cost to put three actresses out on the water and make it look like they were skiing behind giant piranha? What Piranha Women has to offer instead is the sight of women who have mouths full of razor sharp teeth. And if that’s not enough, when they drop their tops we see that their breasts also have little piranha mouths on them.

The early announcement said that the Piranha Women would be thieves, but that was back when Lindsey Schmitz was going to be writing and directing. The project was passed over to legendary and incredibly prolific writer/director Fred Olen Ray along the way (Piranha Women is the 80th writing credit on his IMDb page and the 163rd directing credit), and he only stuck with the idea that this would be a story of science run amok. Like so many other things in the horror genre, the piranha women are the result of scientific intentions to improve the world. Dr. Mark Sinclair (Shary Nassimi) at the Institute of Morphological Medicine in Antonio Bay (presumably a nod to John Carpenter’s The Fog) has come up with an experimental cancer treatment that involves binding human DNA with a strand of piranha DNA. Ray gets the technobabble out of the way as simply and quickly as possible. The how and why isn’t very important when we have to get to the scenes of women chomping on people with their mouths and their breast-mouths.

The protagonist of this story is a young man named Richard (Bobby Rice), whose girlfriend Lexi (Sof Puchley) is not doing well. While, unbeknownst to our heroes, the piranha women created by Dr. Sinclair are out there seducing men at the local bar so they can take them home and feed on them, Lexi seeks Sinclair’s help. The improvement is almost instantaneous, but so is the transformation into a piranha woman. Lexi disappears from Richard’s life… and when he goes looking for her, he ends up on the bad side of the piranha women.

There is not much at all to Piranha Women. The movie barely scrapes 60 minutes, and some of those minutes are due to the fact that Full Moon has released it in two parts, both of them with an opening title sequence and end credits (plus a quick recap at the start of the second chapter). There aren’t many scenes packed into its short running time, and it moves through those scenes quickly, giving us multiple piranha women attacks along the way. Basically, this is exactly the sort of easy viewing experience you want a low budget B-movie to be. It’s not likely to become a new favorite for many viewers, but it’s entertaining enough that it’s not likely many viewers will regret spending an hour of their lives watching it.

Fans of Ray’s work will be glad to see that his frequent collaborator Richard Gabai, who previously worked with him on Dinosaur Island, Thirteen Erotic Ghosts, and a couple dozen other projects, made it into the cast of this one, playing one of the two detectives investigating the piranha women murders. The other detective is played by Michael Gaglio, who is credited on twenty other Ray movies, like Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle and Dirty Blondes from Beyond. The most deadly piranha women in the film are played by Carrie Overgaard and newcomer Keep Chambers, and they do well with the material they were given to work with. I totally bought them as seductive ladies with piranha teeth and a hunger for human flesh.

If you put on a Full Moon / Fred Olen Ray movie called Piranha Women, you probably know exactly what you’re getting into at the start. It doesn’t stand alongside the classics in the filmographies of Full Moon and Ray, but it’s fine. It’s worth a watch if you’re into this sort of thing. You already know if you are or not; this isn’t the sort of movie that is going to win people over and create new B-movie fans. More could be done with the concept of piranha women, but that’s what sequels are for.

Both parts of Piranha Women are now available to watch on the Full Moon Features channel and app. The second part will be added to Full Moon’s Amazon Prime channel on July 1st.

Piranha Women

BELOW AVERAGE

5