Killer Fish (1979)

If you’re gonna steal a bunch of diamonds from your former employers, go big, thinks Paul Diller (James Franciscus), so while he’s having a nice game of backgammon as an alibi, a power plant and other stuff explodes as a distraction while his nurse-turned-lover Kate (Karen Black putting way more effort in than anyone else on screen) and a group of professional criminals lead by professional criminal and semi-professional ladies man Lasky (Lee Majors playing that character he’s always playing lest horrible things will happen on screen, one supposes) do the actual stealing.

Things go well enough, and the successful criminals sink their loot in a lake to let it wait there for sixty days until the heat dies down. Alas, not everyone – namely some of Lasky’s buddies - is too happy with the idea of waiting two whole months in a tourist town in Brazil (there’s obviously no accounting for taste). They learn all too soon that Diller has taken some precautions for this case, for he has infested the nicely dammed off lake with piranhas who proceed to eat the untrustworthy criminals. Despite this not hanging well with Lasky, he still finds time and space to romance visiting model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway, not able to act as usual) and say stuff like: “Historically, bisexuality is a lot older than any of my blocks” (seriously). Obviously, everyone involved is still trying to pull one over (though it’s clear Lasky and Kate would both have preferred to play fair) on each other, an activity that gets decidedly more dangerous once a storm destroys the dam and the surviving cast find themselves on a sinking boat on a piranha-infested lake.

As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well. Instead, the movie is a series of barely connected events, cool ideas, horrible ideas and the mandatory in about half of its sub-genres boring modelling scenes. Somehow, this film-like entity still manages to have something like a discernible plot – mostly because it is entirely made out of clichés, one might suspect.

On the other hand, the film’s cool ideas lead to some fine library footage explosions, later on some of that patented Margheriti model work for the dam destruction sequences, and many a scene of actors getting eaten by fish. That’s rather enough to keep me entertained at least, and while I’d never pretend Killer Fish is anything like a brilliant movie (or even among the best third of Margheriti’s films), its mix of absolutely archetypal genre clichés, but from a bunch of different genres just thrown together, is rather irresistible to someone like me fascinated by the way the content of 70s men’s adventure books made it into the movies (without said movies ever actually adapting them). There’s a somewhat grimy charm to the resulting film that’s certainly enhanced – the charm part, this is - by it being actually shot in Brazil, the generally lovely cast, and the curiously likeable quality most of Margheriti’s movies (even those in the sleazier genres) have for me.

Will Penny (1968)

Aging cowhand Will Penny (Charlton Heston) has just ended a trail somewhere in the colder parts of the West at the beginning of winter. Together with two of his colleagues, Dutchy (Anthony Zerbe) and Blue (Lee Majors), who are probably as close to friends as the rather shy Will ever comes, Will’s planning on finding work at a nearby ranch.

Before that can happen, though, the trio encounters the crazy family of crazy “Preacher” Quint (Donald Pleasence). A pointless altercation about an elk leaves one of Quint’s sons dead and Dutchy badly wounded. Quint swears vengeance, but because there’s a river in the way, it’ll probably have to wait a bit. While Blue and Dutchy end up in the closest town, with Dutchy probably dying, Will goes on to that ranch they were looking for. There, he hires on as a line rider, a cowhand living at the edge of the ranch’s areal, keeping cattle from wandering off.

Unfortunately, while out and about in the increasingly snowy mountains, Will encounters Quint and his family again. They quickly overwhelm him and leave him to die, bleeding out in the cold. Fortunately, Will’s mountain cabin is being squatted in by Catherine Allen (Joan Hackett) and her little son Horace (Jon Gries) who have been left behind by a guide supposed to bring them to California and Catherine’s husband. Catherine saves Will’s life, and slowly, a romance develops between the unhappily married woman and the sensitive, even fragile, cowboy. Things might develop into a direction that may be good for both of them, as well as for the boy, but alas Quint isn’t finished with Will yet.

This description does make Tom Gries’s Will Penny sound like a more concise film than it actually is, when it is in fact, particularly during its first half, a rather meandering and episodic one. Most of these episodes do come together to make a whole later on, though, if you have the patience to follow the film where it leads. The meandering feel of the early film is of course also just a clever mirror of Will’s life, a slow, directionless drifting from no place special to no place special, something that is only focused through Will’s work, sudden bouts of violence one encounters in the place where Will lives even if one is as basically peaceful as he is, and finally his encounter with Catherine and her boy.

In what I can only call a completely unexpected turn of events, Heston plays Will, the absolute opposite of the larger than life grimacing assholes he specialized in and, in the end, seems to have turned into in real life, exceedingly well. I really didn’t think Heston had something like this in him, a character as believably sensitive, even shy, and emotionally pained as Will is, a man who is quite conscious of the fact that he’s going nowhere, the place he’s coming from not much worth mentioning either. There’s, believe it or not, a subtlety to Heston’s performance of Will that suggests he could have been a much better actor than he ever was a star. It is really Heston’s performance that carries the film through its necessarily slow parts, until what actually is his second encounter with Catherine after an earlier episodic moment starts the actual plot, and quite possibly the first great emotional upheaval Will has undergone in years, or ever.

And while this is very definitely Will’s story, the film leaves space for Joan Hackett to turn Catherine into much more than just someone the cowhand could anchor himself too, a plot device with breasts. Instead the film shows us a woman as complex, complicated and curiously practical as her male counterpart is, with plans, and agency, and a life all her own. Hackett and Heston do work very well with one another, too, making clear what attracts them to each other without any need for the film to ever spell it out, going far beyond the point of lonely people feeling attracted to one another.

The weakest link in the acting chain here is, strangely enough, good old dependable Donald Pleasence who lays his crazy person shtick on a little too thick, going from threatening to cartoony, standing quite in opposition to the rest of the actors. It’s the kind of performance you’d use in a Heston film when Chuck does his usual Moses, but not between naturalistic and subtle performances as they’re found here. It’s hardly enough of a flaw to ruin the film even a little, though, because Quint isn’t the point of the film. It is – very pointedly – not Pleasence’s character that begins or ends the relationship between Will and Catherine, but Will’s own inability to get over a fear that finds an easy confederate in his frontier pragmatism, which is an easy shield against the risks of the heart.

If I haven’t really mentioned anything about Tom Gries’s direction of the film, then it’s because Will Penny, following the suggestion of its title, is very much a film about people and landscape, and Gries’s part of the job in bringing his own script to life is letting the people and the landscape do the talking. Which he does quite perfectly.

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