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Barracuda
[Dark Sky Films]
1978; color
Directed by Harry Kerwin
Starring: Wayne Crawford, Jason Evers, Roberta Leighton, Cliff Emmich, William Kerwin & Bert Freed
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Barracuda is one of those marginally horror-filled horror flicks from the late '70s (1978 to be exact) that probably played drive-in circuits on bottom-of-the-barrel double-bills with equally forgettable films like Island Fury. Ostensibly set up as a tale of over-sized barracudas gone berserk, the underlying plot (yes, there actually is one) is wrapped up in environmental pollution and big brother-esque government conspiracies. Set in the quaint fictional town of Palm Cove, FL, everything starts off calmly enough with a college prof. and some of his students taking water samples along a stretch of beach in front of a chemical plant. Needless to say this doesn't sit well with the owner of said plant, who manages to get the prof. (but not his students) arrested for trespassing. While cooling his heels in lockup he befriends the sheriff (played by HG Lewis regular Bill Kerwin), who apparently has pre-existing beef with the chem plant owner. Meanwhile, a couple people in a neighboring town are reported missing after they never come home from a fishing trip. Normally this would be no big deal but, the next morning, a girl walking along the beach finds a severed head (still in the head part of a scuba suit, snorkel and mask still attached), and everyone starts getting inquisitive. Also, everyone in town starts to have real short tempers. After too much drawn-out explanation and bad acting we finally get to see footage of barracudas "attacking" a diver - which really looks like a guy holding a rubber 'cuda head onto his arm and thrashing around. (As a side note, it's kind of funny to me that a lot of the blood in the water scenes appear to be a noticeable in-camera color swap from blue to blood red; guess they couldn't afford squibs.) Eventually the prof. and the sheriff figure out that the plant is doctoring the town's water supply and spillover from it's experiments is polluting the sea water. The result being people get angry and fish go crazy. After almost everyone who has any knowledge of what's going on begins to get killed off, the prof. and the sheriff realize they're actually pitted against the people behind the chemical plant, i.e., the federal government. This leads to the inevitable showdown resulting in the overused '70s horror ending where everybody (at least everybody "good") dies. I know I'm spoiling it, but Barracuda is almost as inedible film-wise as the fish itself is in reality.
—the Kommandant
(Read Bunny's review of Island Fury here.)
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