Written by Mr. Mouseburger 15th Apr 2008

The premise of this film is simple. Geared around the success of creature features like Jaws, the producers decided to think of another creature from the deep that can instill a similar sort of visceral reaction in the audience; the piranha.

Aesthetically they are ugly feckers and, it is purported, they can strip an animal to the bone in 30 seconds. However, these factoids are clearly not terrifying enough for the movie producers and so they invent a genetic modification backstory where the piranha's are; injected with Mike Tyson's aggression; cross-bred with the malevolence of Freddy Krueger; and imbued with the intelligence of Steven Hawking (more about this later).

The whole point of this was an vain attempt by the US military to "poison" the rivers of vietnam with the piranha, who would eat all the other fish in the rivers, starving the Vietcong into submission. Yeah, right! Anyway, the fish are inadvertantly released into a US river system, and it is not long before people start getting gnawed on. 

One such person is Jack, who looks like a grizzled 19th century prospector (dagnabit!). Living by the river, he enjoys nothing more than dangling his rod over the water and catching a few fish for supper, all the while chatting to his best friend in the world, his dog.

It is a simple life, but one that is about to come to an end prematurely, as Jack has his feet dangling in the water, presumably to cool them of. A first, he feels a little nibble on his line and then the Piranha swarm and start biting chunks out of his legs. Now, most sensible people would remove their legs from the water at this point thereby removing the threat, but Jack is clearly not that bright and so he just thrashes about screaming with his legs still in the water.

The scene cuts at this point and we don't get to find out his fate until a bit later in the film when the main protagonist and his bit of fluff turn up and see jack lying on the ground not far from his jeep. In a last deperate attempt to get help, Jack managed to crawl towards his jeep, but, as the hero explains, he died of blood loss. With a bit of camera work we can see why, the legs from the knee down have been picked clean of flesh, tendons, ligament, all that remains are a set of immaculately white leg and feet bones.

This is somewhat perplexing as despite there being nothing to hold the bones together, they are laid out perfectly on the ground in the correct order.