KILLER FISH (UK/Italy/Brazil/US - 1979) Directed by Anthony M. Dawson (Antonio Margheriti). Written by Michael Rogers. Cast: Lee Majors, Karen Black, Margaux Hemingway, Marisa Berenson, James Franciscus, Gary Collins, Anthony Steffen, Dan Pastorini, Roy Brocksmith, Frank Pesce, Charlie Guardino, Fabio Sabag, Chico Arago, Jorge Cherques. (PG, 101 mins)
A hybrid of heist thriller, disaster movie, and JAWS ripoff, KILLER FISH is a perfect example of the kind of international co-production insanity that only could've happened in the 1970s. Produced by the UK's Sir Lew Grade, Italy's Carlo Ponti, the Brazilian company Filmar do Brasil, and American TV power couple Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the film was designed as a star vehicle for Lee Majors, whose successful five-season run on ABC's THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN had just come to a close in 1978. Majors, a veteran of several past TV hits like THE BIG VALLEY, THE VIRGINIAN, and OWEN MARSHALL, COUNSELOR AT LAW, was trying to parlay his television success into a big-screen career and from 1978 to 1981, starred in several B-movies of usually dubious quality, while at the same time turning down an offer from Paramount to co-star with Nick Nolte in NORTH DALLAS FORTY (1979). Majors' role--a hard-partying, good ol' boy star quarterback--went to Mac Davis and the film is now regarded by many as the definitive serious football film. While NORTH DALLAS FORTY was a box office hit and opened to almost universal acclaim, Majors was making KILLER FISH and other films like THE NORSEMAN (1978), STEEL (1980), AGENCY (1981), and THE LAST CHASE (1981), all of which were out of theaters in a week, and by the end of 1981, he was back on ABC for another series, THE FALL GUY, which ran until 1986.
Of those five films Majors made before going back to TV, KILLER FISH has become a legitimate cult film, primarily for its loony plot and its unusual cast, and that it's directed by legendary Eurocult journeyman Antonio Margheriti, using his usual "Anthony M. Dawson" pseudonym. Margheriti was just coming off his NYC-shot heist thriller THE SQUEEZE and brought that film's suddenly slumming co-star Karen Black along to Brazil for another heist plot. Shot entirely in some stunningly beautiful locations, it's very likely that it was the idea of a working vacation in Rio that lured much of KILLER FISH's cast, which had an unusually large number of American actors for such trashy European-ish fare. While the Italian/West German co-production THE SQUEEZE is probably Margheriti's most American-looking film thanks to some effective location work in some grimy parts of Manhattan and just over the river in New Jersey, KILLER FISH is right alongside the US/Spanish blaxploitation western TAKE A HARD RIDE (1975) and the rainforest-set Italian RAMBO ripoff INDIO (1989) as the most American-feeling of Margheriti's vast output. Much effort was made to package KILLER FISH like a typical Hollywood disaster movie, with only one Italian actor in the cast (former DJANGO Anthony Steffen, best known for 1971's THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE), several Americans, including model Margaux Hemingway, part-time actor and soon-to-be talk show and Miss America host Gary Collins and, as usual in these types of movies, an off-season football star--in this case, Houston Oilers QB Dan Pastorini. KILLER FISH also sported its own Maureen McGovern-mandated disaster movie theme song, "Winner Takes All," performed by flash-in-the-pan disco queen Amii Stewart, who had a chart-topping, Grammy-nominated hit in early 1979 with "Knock on Wood."
KILLER FISH is great cheesy entertainment, but other than the outstanding location shooting by cinematographer Alberto Spagnoli, it can barely compete with the budget-conscious likes of Roger Corman, let alone the expensive product that Master of Disaster Irwin Allen was cranking out. The main reason is that Margheriti was too attached to his use of outdated miniatures, which he would be until the end of his career. Sloppy rearscreen projection work is one thing, but toy trains and model dams that look like Lionel factory irregulars aren't going to cut the mustard. Of course, now these laughable effects are part of KILLER FISH's charm, but Margheriti's continued insistence on using techniques that were antiquated in the 1960s would consistently undermine his work into the 1990s. Margheriti was adept at action scenes and shootouts and could stage an explosion as impressively as any director who ever stepped on to a movie set, but it's hard to get into the excitement of a car chase in something like CODENAME: WILDGEESE (1984) when you can clearly see in a few shots that it's a toy car with an immobile plastic action figure in the driver's seat. For all the big names involved in the financing, KILLER FISH often looks ridiculously cheap. It's more likely that most of money went to the actors, their hotel bills, their bar tabs, and their per diems than toward anything that ended up on the screen. KILLER FISH is so lacking in funds for special effects and spectacle that Ponti had Margheriti open it with a factory explosion lifted completely from THE SQUEEZE.
In Brazil, former mine executive and fanatical backgammon enthusiast Paul Diller (James Franciscus), pushed out of the company after a heart attack, has hired a team of professional thieves led by Lasky (Majors) to break into a secure part of the mine and make off with a large stash of diamonds and emeralds. Helping Lasky is Diller's girlfriend Kate (Black), and when the team stashes the diamonds in a weighed-down metal container at the bottom of a lake, tensions start to mount when Kate suggests they wait 60 days for the cops to give up looking for them or the loot. That doesn't sit well with Lasky, who's conspired with a pair of sibling mooks, Warren (Frank Pesce) and Lloyd (Charlie Guardino) to replace the container in the lake with another and make off with the goods. When Lloyd dives into the lake to retrieve the container, he's promptly devoured by something unseen, which Warren thinks is "a giant snake." Warren talks their getaway driver Hans (Pastorini) into diving into the lake to check things, and when he starts being eaten in a similar fashion, Warren falls in trying to rescue him and they're both dead. It seems that months before pulling off the heist, Diller introduced an especially vicious strain of piranha into the lake to breed ("There's probably tens of thousands of them by now," he sneers), completely altering the ecosystem of a major tourist destination just in case some criminal co-conspirators got greedy. When one of cinema's least convincing hurricanes hits and destroys a nearby dam, the piranha are let loose in the open water and almost everyone in the cast who hasn't been eaten ends up on a small, damaged, dead-in-the-water charter boat captained by rugged local sea salt Max (Steffen, dubbed by Ted Rusoff), who's acting as a guide for a fashion shoot for supermodel Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway), her manager Ann (Marisa Berenson), and portly, flamboyant photographer Ollie (Roy Brocksmith). As an untold number of hungry piranha surround the boat, Diller--after a backgammon showdown with Lasky--is willing to kill everyone if it means getting away and keeping his diamonds, and it's up to playboy pilot Tom (Collins) to rescue the stranded boaters.
The climax is quite hilarious at times, with Majors' Lasky and Steffen's Max indulging in heroics so stupid that you might even think they deserve to be piranha chow. Franciscus is appropriately dastardly and Black has one very convincing scene where her character is having a convulsing panic attack as she's being pulled out of the water after nearly being eaten. There's also a strange sexual undercurrent to the film, with Kate growing intensely jealous over Lasky's pre-mayhem resort romance with Gabrielle, and Gabrielle subtly suggesting to Lasky that they have a threesome with the bisexual Ollie. In addition, Margheriti and screenwriter Michael Rogers (probably a pseudonym for a committee of Italian writers, as this is "Rogers"' only IMDb credit) spend far too much time on Tom trying to get in Ann's pants. There's too many characters in KILLER FISH, with Tom and Ann's flirting, Ollie functioning as dual stereotypes of the raging queen and comic-relief fat guy, and even more extraneous characters turning up on the boat with no purpose at all. When KILLER FISH focuses on the heist, the piranha, and the janky special effects--the piranha swimming shots are priceless--it's a lot of fun.
Arriving not long after the definitive piranha movie, Joe Dante's PIRANHA (1978), KILLER FISH opened in US theaters in December 1979 and promptly bombed. It played on NBC a few times starting in 1981, under the title DEADLY TREASURE OF THE PIRANHA, and was released on VHS in 1986 as KILLER FISH, but has only now been released on DVD and Blu-ray, courtesy of Scorpion Releasing/Kino Lorber. The 1.78 transfer is pristine as can be, and the sole bonus feature is a nearly-hour-long informal dinner discussion between Frank Pesce and cult filmmaker William Lustig (MANIAC, MANIAC COP), who's known Pesce for decades and worked as a production assistant on the American location shooting of Margheriti's THE SQUEEZE. Pesce found work as an extra in THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and was hanging around the set of ROCKY (1976), lucking into acting after winning $6 million in the New York state lottery in 1976. He's appeared in many movies and TV shows over the years, usually B or straight-to-video titles, but he's occasionally turned up in big movies--he's the bolting cigarette buyer at the beginning of BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984) and returned to further incur Axel Foley's wrath in BEVERLY HILLS COP II (1987), and he played gangsters in MIDNIGHT RUN (1988) and DONNIE BRASCO (1997). His story was chronicled in the 1991 film 29TH STREET, with Anthony LaPaglia as Pesce, and the film produced and based on a story by Pesce and Franciscus, who became good friends after working together on KILLER FISH (Franciscus retired from acting in 1985 and died of emphysema at just 57 in 1991, a few months before 29TH STREET's release). Pesce and Lustig get sidetracked, as old friends do, and don't start talking about KILLER FISH until midway through the segment, but Pesce's got some priceless stories about his and Lustig's late friend Joe Spinell, and about working as a stand-in for Robert De Niro on TAXI DRIVER (1976), and Roy Scheider on MARATHON MAN (1976) and in the NYC scenes in SORCERER (1977). He also talks about Black trying to convert him to Scientology and tells a great story about some KILLER FISH cast and crew members going to a popular Rio disco, where Pesce's working his magic on an attractive blonde and was about to make his move when a bat flew into his hair, startling him and prompting him to scream loudly. The blonde immediately lost interest and Pesce later saw her leaving with Majors, who was "with her" for the rest of the shoot. Regarding Majors and his then-wife Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Pesce recalls that it was during the filming of KILLER FISH that Majors got word that Fawcett was involved with Ryan O'Neal, or as Pesce eloquently puts it, "Lee found out that whatsisname, Ryan O'Neal, was bangin' Farrah."
Directed by Roger Deodato (Ruggero Deodato). Written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Renzo Genta. Cast: James Franciscus, Mimsy Farmer, Van Johnson, Joseph Cotten, Mario Maranzana, Venantino Venantini, Mag Fleming (Fiamma Maglione), Edmund Purdom, Francisco Charles, Ottaviano dell'Acqua, Renzo Marignano, Robert Kerman, Robert Spafford, Goffredo Unger, John P. Dulaney, John Stacy, Michael Gaunt, Jake Teague, Dakar, Marie Claude Joseph. (Unrated, 96 mins)
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italian ripoffs of American blockbusters were big business at US drive-ins and in grindhouses and provided constant employment for American actors ranging from leading men and women whose stars were fading to aging Hollywood vets from the golden era, or some who simply wanted a paid vacation and figured nobody outside of Europe would ever see it. Wade through enough Eurocult exploitation swill and you'll be amazed at what you find. Henry Fonda appearing in the 1977 Italian JAWS ripoff TENTACLES or Kirk Douglas starring in the 1978 Italian OMEN ripoff HOLOCAUST 2000 are merely scratching the surface. Wait until you get to Richard Harris taking third billing in Bruno Mattei's 1988 RAMBO ripoff STRIKE COMMANDO 2, the standard by which all "WTF is (fill in actor's name) doing in this?!" Eurotrash paycheck gigs are judged.
Universal's AIRPORT franchise, along with blockbusters like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) and THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) were the building blocks of the '70s disaster film cycle, so, as had happened in the same decade with a flood of GODFATHER and EXORCIST clones, it was inevitable that the Italians would have to make their own version of a disaster movie. And, in true exploitation fashion, Ruggero Deodato's CONCORDE AFFAIR was rushed through production quickly and cheaply and beat its big-budget counterpart (THE CONCORDE: AIRPORT '79, the final film in the franchise) to European screens by several months. Despite featuring more American stars than was typical for such fare, CONCORDE AFFAIR never made it into American theaters, though it was acquired in 1983 (four years after its release everywhere else and several years after the disaster craze had died down and been so brilliantly parodied by AIRPLANE! in 1980), by none other than the Weinstein brothers in the early days of Miramax. But they shelved it and it's really only been seen on bootleg VHS and unauthorized DVDs over the years. And now, possibly as part of its deal with Miramax, this little-seen B-movie is now streaming on Netflix.
As far as cheap Italian ripoffs go, it's pretty entertaining, though much of the amusement comes from just how little of the plot and the primary action take place on an airplane. A Concorde test flight experiences technical problems and crashes near the Antilles, and it's actually sabotage set in motion by evil rival airline CEO Milland (CITIZEN KANE's Joseph Cotten) who wants to put the Concorde out of business. Milland doesn't count on the test flight's one attendant, Jean Beneyton (Mimsy Farmer), surviving the crash. He dispatches his henchmen, led by the ruthless Forsythe (Venantino Venantini), to kill Jean, but instead, they hold her captive and try to blackmail Milland, who's easily one of cinema's most recklessly hubristic businessmen. Meanwhile, hack NYC reporter Moses Brody (BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES' James Franciscus) has an ex-wife (Fiamma Maglione) on Martinique, and she gives him a tip to get down there because she knows something about the Concorde crash. The ex is mysteriously dead by the time Brody arrives, and after doing some investigating, he discovers the sunken Concorde. By the time he convinces the American consulate to look into the matter, Milland has had the plane destroyed. Brody rescues Jean, with Forsythe and his goons in hot pursuit, and in the meantime, a second Concorde, piloted by Capt. Scott (THE CAINE MUTINY's Van Johnson), is taking off from NYC to London, and Milland has dispatched new saboteurs to ensure this flight will suffer the same consequences.
It seems like there's about four different movies going on here. The bulk of the film deals with Brody's investigation in the Antilles, with a lot of underwater sequences and even a brief shark attack, as if Deodato was giving Franciscus a taste of what he'd encounter a couple of years later in Enzo G. Castellari's GREAT WHITE. There's periodic cutaways to an irate Cotten, sitting in his office and grumbling to yes-man Danker (Edmund Purdom). Johnson doesn't even appear until nearly an hour into the film, and even then, he's never seen out of the pilot's seat. I'd bet Hollywood legends Cotten and Johnson, by now old hands at vacillating between quick-buck appearances in Italian trash and enjoying the relative prestige of LOVE BOAT and FANTASY ISLAND guest spots, didn't spend more than two, maybe three days working on this.
James Franciscus and Mimsy Farmer
Franciscus is fine in the lead, bringing an appropriate Charlton Heston-esque gravitas to the proceedings. A well-known movie and TV actor, Franciscus still never quite made it to Hollywood's A-list, which probably made it a certainty that he'd end up in movies like this, Antonio Margheriti's KILLER FISH (also 1979) and Castellari's GREAT WHITE (1982), while tackling supporting roles in American films like Irwin Allen's WHEN TIME RAN OUT (1980). Franciscus was a believable and good-looking actor who deserved a better career. He didn't act after 1985 and was only 57 when he died of complications from emphysema in 1991. You'd think he'd end up being the hero in CONCORDE AFFAIR, but he's pretty much relegated to the sideline for the last 20 or so minutes, though he does get to give Farmer an inspirational pep talk when she's on the phone with Heathrow air traffic controllers. I love that the British air traffic guys are all played by dubbed-with-Brit-accents NYC porn actors Robert Kerman (aka R. Bolla), Michael Gaunt, and Jake Teague, all of whom made periodic appearances in Italian exploitation.
Deodato, largely a journeyman at this point in his career, follows the disaster formula and keeps things pretty restrained in CONCORDE AFFAIR, a surprise considering his next two films were his masterpiece/albatross CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and the scuzzy HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK (both 1980). Deodato had dabbled in over-the-top exploitation before, with 1975's sexploitation WAVES OF LUST, 1976's insane poliziotteschi LIVE LIKE A COP, DIE LIKE A MAN, and 1977's gorefest THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (aka JUNGLE HOLOCAUST, THE LAST SURVIVOR). There's an F-bomb early on and one gory shot of a guy getting shot in the face, but other than that, CONCORDE AFFAIR is tame by Deodato standards, displaying none of the stomach-turning imagery and disturbing violence so prevalent in many of his other films.
Featuring a large cast of name actors and Eurocult mainstays (including a rare on-camera appearance by gravelly-voiced dubbing vet Robert Spafford), and all the familiar dubbing voices, plus hilarious miniatures and a Concorde model surrounded by toy cars in the climax, as well as a Stelvio Cipriani score that features the composer at his most harpsichordy, CONCORDE AFFAIR is mindless entertainment that should please Eurotrash completists. The relative rarity of it, at least for US viewers, is enough to make it a curio title, especially since Netflix streaming has granted it the easiest accessibility it's ever had in America. Their print looks like a 1.33 VHS transfer, cropped down from its original 2.35--not ideal, but given the circumstances, it's better than nothing.
Trailer for French release, titled S.O.S. CONCORDE
