Oh, what to say about this movie. It is certainly a B movie, and one that was banking on the residual popularity of Jaws (1975) to boot. Piranha and Jaws both have the same opening scene of two teenagers skinny dipping at night, though in Piranha the skinny dipping is taking place in the woods at what appears to be a water treatment plant but then turns out to be a place where the government was breeding genetically modified piranha to use in the Vietnam War.
Well, when the war ended suddenly the researchers were left with tons of man-eating fishes to take care of, and as everyone knows, the government isn't about to let a perfect weapon such as a fish get destroyed before they got to use it on some unsuspecting populace; so they kept the fish in tanks until such time as they could be used. Did I forget to mention that these tanks were, for some reason, connected to a massive and popular river where a resort was about to open and a popular summer camp was held every year? Cause that's the way it was.
This movie was SyFy channel before the syfy channel was ever invented. The colonel that backed the fish is also one of the people who invested money in the resort. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots and see how this ends.
I kind of think that the whole movie was made for a specific line: "Sir, about the piranha..." "What about the piranha?" "They're eating the guests, sir."
The villains were stereotypical "Bad Guys" tm. More interested in collecting money than saving lives, that is, until the lives lost cost them money.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how this movie ends. But it was an amusing journey to say the least. Not nearly as annoying as the remake (Piranha 3D). I had a lot more to say about this movie, but once the credits began to roll I lost any attention I had for the movie so I'm just going to end this here.
If you like B movie concepts with syfy quality take a gander at this and you won't be disappointed.
