Piranha

Piranha (1978) is a horror-comedy you can watch online on iFILM. It was one of Joe Dante's first hits, produced by Roger Corman as a gleefully cheap riff on Jaws.

A shuttered military lab once bred a strain of piranha engineered to survive anywhere: fresh water, salt water, cold, you name it. A skip tracer and a backwoods drunk drain an old holding tank into a mountain river by mistake. Downstream sit a kids' summer camp and a brand-new lakeside resort, both packed with vacationers who have no idea what's coming. The swarm heads down the current faster than anyone will admit the threat is real.

John Sayles wrote the screenplay, and the cast packs in genre faces like Kevin McCarthy, Barbara Steele and Dick Miller. This low-budget feature isn't really out to scare you; it's grinning the whole time, splashing blood between jabs at greedy developers and the military. A scrappy, mean little slice of late-1970s B-movie fun. Stream Piranha (1978) online on iFILM.