I still remember sneaking downstairs one June evening when I was about 12, watching the tail end of Johnny Carson and then managing quite by chance to catch BARRACUDA on The Late Show. This would have been in about 1979, and amazingly three scenes stuck with me for the ensuing 28 years: A cute young chick in her swimsuit (identified as one Jill Shakoor, who was cute enough for me to have a crush on all summer after seeing it that one time) playing fetch with her dog in the surf before finding a severed human head, a nauseating roadside diner lunch consisting of fried fish with the eyes still intact (echoes of CHINATOWN, maybe), and the predictably nihilistic paranoid 70s ending where the two heroes are blown away in slow motion by a legion of crooked state troopers.
If you think I just gave away the whole movie rest assured that there's a LOT more going on here than meets the eye, even on a threadbare budget that barely afforded a dune buggy for the hero to drive around in during the big climax. As a matter of fact, this movie has a bit of everything: JAWS ripoff, environmental "nature strikes back" thriller, a newspaper investigative editor on the trail of a hot scoop, government corruption intrigue, a few girls in swimsuits, PG rated but still somewhat gory barracuda attacks, a doctor who may be mixed up in a military chemical warfare experiment, men in black government assassins with chirping silencer equipped pistols, intriguing underwater photography, a greedy chemical plant owner with a somewhat retarded son, goons menacing people with shotguns, a touch of summer love romance, and an amusing parade of late 70s fashions & hairstyles that is exemplified by the hero's striped rugby shirt -- remember those?
Nearly 30 years later now I managed to track down a foreign language subtitled VHS of the film and was pleasantly amused to find out that while BARRACUDA is a home-brew vanity project of sorts (written in part by Wayne Crawford, directed in part by Wayne Crawford, produced in part by Wayne Crawford, and starring Wayne Crawford under his clever early years screen name of Wayne David Crawford, who is still at it these days with favorites like 2002's SNAKE ISLAND) it's actually a pretty competent little low budget "Regional Horror" effort made in and around Pompano Beach, Florida, that managed to anticipate THE X-FILES 20 years before Chris Carter debuted his creation, including an ominous electronic synthesizer music score by Klaus Schulze. Someone had their thinking cap on when they wrote this.
We get the scruffy looking post-doctorate grad school teacher marine biologist hero-type trying to get to the bottom of a mystery of why the local barracuda population has suddenly turned to attacking humans, teaming up with a reluctant local sheriff (Hershel Gordon Lewis favorite William Kerwin), the requisite Fat Cop deputy (longtime supporting heavy favorite Cliff Emmich), the sheriff's sweetie pie 19 year old daughter (Roberta Leighton, looking fresh), and the local newspaper editorial staff (Wayne Hackett, along with future gay porn actor Scott Avery as his, ahem, assistant) with the town doctor (the late Jason Evers, whom Star Trek: TOS fans will recognize as Scalosian leader Rael from "Wink of an Eye") implicated by shady connections to the mystery which -- get this -- involves creating a "hypoglycemic condition" within the townspeople via the chemical waste produced by the corrupt chemical plant owner (ubiquitous bad-guy expert Bert Freed in another priceless role) that is really the front for a government run chemical warfare experiment on creating hostility & disorder within a civilian population.
In other words the movie has almost too much going on, with the at times gruesome barracuda attacks just a red herring to involve viewers in a mystery that explains itself from the back to the front: Events in the final ten minutes cast ominous light over actions from the body of the film which seem at the time to have little bearing over the story (people arguing for no reason, a seeming addiction to bottled water, the doctor doling out odd looking blue tablets for the slightest ailment), but by the time the pieces all fall into place the heroes have been effectively condemned by their mounting paranoia, with only one possible conclusion.
So here's a movie who's ideas are actually bigger than the production itself. The cinematography is rather pedestrian with no real grabber moments -- aside from the three big barracuda attacks, which occur at roughly 20 minute intervals -- and none of the acting will make anyone forget about Brando's monologue about nearly being a contender. A couple of the sequences are lifted directly from JAWS, most notably a dinner table discussion followed by late night scuba mission that is as close to plagiarism as it gets. But the story being told is convoluted enough to help the film amount to more than the sum of it's parts, and rewards patient viewers with a taste for regional low budget horror with something that's quite out of the ordinary ... in spite of how ordinary it appears to be.
7/10
If you think I just gave away the whole movie rest assured that there's a LOT more going on here than meets the eye, even on a threadbare budget that barely afforded a dune buggy for the hero to drive around in during the big climax. As a matter of fact, this movie has a bit of everything: JAWS ripoff, environmental "nature strikes back" thriller, a newspaper investigative editor on the trail of a hot scoop, government corruption intrigue, a few girls in swimsuits, PG rated but still somewhat gory barracuda attacks, a doctor who may be mixed up in a military chemical warfare experiment, men in black government assassins with chirping silencer equipped pistols, intriguing underwater photography, a greedy chemical plant owner with a somewhat retarded son, goons menacing people with shotguns, a touch of summer love romance, and an amusing parade of late 70s fashions & hairstyles that is exemplified by the hero's striped rugby shirt -- remember those?
Nearly 30 years later now I managed to track down a foreign language subtitled VHS of the film and was pleasantly amused to find out that while BARRACUDA is a home-brew vanity project of sorts (written in part by Wayne Crawford, directed in part by Wayne Crawford, produced in part by Wayne Crawford, and starring Wayne Crawford under his clever early years screen name of Wayne David Crawford, who is still at it these days with favorites like 2002's SNAKE ISLAND) it's actually a pretty competent little low budget "Regional Horror" effort made in and around Pompano Beach, Florida, that managed to anticipate THE X-FILES 20 years before Chris Carter debuted his creation, including an ominous electronic synthesizer music score by Klaus Schulze. Someone had their thinking cap on when they wrote this.
We get the scruffy looking post-doctorate grad school teacher marine biologist hero-type trying to get to the bottom of a mystery of why the local barracuda population has suddenly turned to attacking humans, teaming up with a reluctant local sheriff (Hershel Gordon Lewis favorite William Kerwin), the requisite Fat Cop deputy (longtime supporting heavy favorite Cliff Emmich), the sheriff's sweetie pie 19 year old daughter (Roberta Leighton, looking fresh), and the local newspaper editorial staff (Wayne Hackett, along with future gay porn actor Scott Avery as his, ahem, assistant) with the town doctor (the late Jason Evers, whom Star Trek: TOS fans will recognize as Scalosian leader Rael from "Wink of an Eye") implicated by shady connections to the mystery which -- get this -- involves creating a "hypoglycemic condition" within the townspeople via the chemical waste produced by the corrupt chemical plant owner (ubiquitous bad-guy expert Bert Freed in another priceless role) that is really the front for a government run chemical warfare experiment on creating hostility & disorder within a civilian population.
In other words the movie has almost too much going on, with the at times gruesome barracuda attacks just a red herring to involve viewers in a mystery that explains itself from the back to the front: Events in the final ten minutes cast ominous light over actions from the body of the film which seem at the time to have little bearing over the story (people arguing for no reason, a seeming addiction to bottled water, the doctor doling out odd looking blue tablets for the slightest ailment), but by the time the pieces all fall into place the heroes have been effectively condemned by their mounting paranoia, with only one possible conclusion.
So here's a movie who's ideas are actually bigger than the production itself. The cinematography is rather pedestrian with no real grabber moments -- aside from the three big barracuda attacks, which occur at roughly 20 minute intervals -- and none of the acting will make anyone forget about Brando's monologue about nearly being a contender. A couple of the sequences are lifted directly from JAWS, most notably a dinner table discussion followed by late night scuba mission that is as close to plagiarism as it gets. But the story being told is convoluted enough to help the film amount to more than the sum of it's parts, and rewards patient viewers with a taste for regional low budget horror with something that's quite out of the ordinary ... in spite of how ordinary it appears to be.
7/10