Barracuda (1978) Review

Barracuda (1978) Review

 

As you may already know, Jaws spawned tons of rip-off films in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I’ve already reviewed one of the best, the original Piranha from 1978. Today I’m reviewing Barracuda, which came out around the same time as Piranha and features equally fearsome fish, but it copies the ocean/beach/small town setting of Jaws. It isn’t as widely known or remembered as Piranha. Is that because it sucks? Well, let’s find out.

The opening titles play out the same as the opening titles from Jaws, over underwater photography. The on-screen titles comes up as Barracuda—and, in brackets beneath: The Lucifer Project. Seems odd to have two titles, but as the movie goes on, it starts to make sense. Right off the bat a couple divers are brutally killed by a school of the toothy fish. There’s footage of real barracuda cut together with shaky close-ups of puppets attacking the actors, and the effects are believable enough. Then we get into the plot, which concerns a marine biologist snooping around a small town and testing the coastal waters for pollution and the potential effects it might have on the town’s residents, which upsets the owner of the Jack chemical company responsible for the pollution. Obviously it’s connected to the string of deaths that occurs along the stretch of beach, as well as the washing up of thousands of dead fish—dead not from the chemicals, but from the overly-aggressive barracudas.

The first act of Barracuda is what you’d expect, with the fish returning for murderous scenes just enough times to keep viewers watching. There’s lots of underwater photography, which isn’t bad, but isn’t particularly thrilling, either. There’s one great moment when it looks like a bather is about to get attacked, but then she finds the washed-up severed head of a diver who was killed earlier. It’s very much a Jaws rip-off in the beginning, but then as it gets into the second act, Barracuda ceases to be even a cheap piece of killer animal fun, and it starts to become clear why it’s also called The Lucifer Project.

The main character is halfway likable, but the supporting characters are all annoying and played by unskilful actors. The residents of the small town are short-tempered, and at first it just seems like a random thing the screenwriters decided to include, but it actually ties in to the reveal of the truth at the end. This might make it sound like it gets good toward the conclusion, but in fact it goes in a different direction from the barracudas, to the point of no longer really being about them at all, which I found disappointing. It becomes ever more focused on chemical pollution, the effects on the people and animals, and the unravelling mystery of the exact effects the plant’s pollution is having.

Not only does Barracuda suffer from a killer-creature-free second act, it veers into the direction of conspiracy revelation for an ending that makes you wonder which kind of movie they were intending to make in the first place: a Jaws rip-off with a sea-going predator, or an eco-horror flick with a conspiratorial twist. The biggest problem is the pacing, which is incredibly slow, and the technical quality is indefensibly poor. There’s a scene where the noise of the boat’s engine overlaps the character’s dialogue, and the bad soundtrack made me laugh because there are three whole separate titles in the opening credits for the music, as if it were something to be proud of. It’s just very generic and does nothing to enhance the scariness or suspense or excitement.

The level of enjoyment to be had with Barracuda depends on how low your standards are. It’s a mostly harmless small budget endeavor, but I think the reason it’s been largely forgotten is because of the genre identity crisis it has halfway through. The barracuda attacks are vicious, bloody, and fairly convincing, but there are too few to really satisfy. If you just want a 70’s ecological thriller with a dark ending, though, you could do worse.