Word: piranha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gorman's New World Pictures in the mid-'70s, Dante learned how to finesse movies on a frayed shoestring. He and Co-Director Allan Arkush shot their first film, Hollywood Boulevard, for a niggardly $60,000 in 1976. Dante's solo directorial debut, the 1978 Piranha, was made for slightly in excess of $1 million. In this fleet-wilted Jaws parody one could see early signs of the Dante style, which keeps tickling the spectator to remember that, in Alfred Hitchcock's famous phrase, "Ingrid, it's only a movie." At the film...
Well, no. The gremlins really are an army of latex-skinned puppets devised by Special Effects Maven Chris Walas (Piranha, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and assembled for a bargain-basement $1.3 million. (By contrast, Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. creature alone cost $1.5 million.) The greenish-brown monsters, standing 23 in. tall with their 10-in. bat ears, were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing...
...sinful things occur. And its equatorial locale is primitive and threatening. Jungle encroaches almost to the doorsteps of Kourou (pop. 7,000), in French Guiana. Only a few miles offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most infamous penal colony, and local waters teem with piranha and alligators...
Just offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most dreaded penal colony. A short distance away, piranha-infested rivers course through the rain forest. Yet out of this equatorial backwater on the steamy coast of French Guiana last week roared a gleaming, cream-colored three-stage rocket emblazoned with the flags of eleven European nations. The fiery liftoff, heard for miles around, was a noisy, jubilant awakening for an independent space effort in faraway Europe...
...Howling, a good-looking, modern-day werewolf picture, boasts not only the writer's pedigree but a young lifetime of B-movie lore devoured and disgorged by Director Joe Dante, with whom Sayles worked three years ago on an engaging Jaws rip-off called Piranha. Their new film drops latent or blatant references to a dozen low-budget horror movies; characters are named after some of the more mediocre talents ever to win a Directors Guild card (Lew Landers, Roy William Neill, Erle C. Kenton); Roger Corman, godfather to many young directors, makes a cameo appearance, as do Forrest...