Piranha Women – review

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

This one was suggested by my friend Leila but I did already have it on my Tubi watch list. In fairness I can see a fair argument to suggest this is not Vamp. We get flesh eating, but not particularly blood/fluid/essence eating and the transformation might be likened as much to a fish-like lycanthrope as a vampire. But I have decided to accept it, for no other reason that it contains vampiric breasts. Also the director is Fred Olen Ray, who is a stalwart of both low budget horror generally and vampire films specifically and so I suspect any genre merging was conscious.

Shauna and Gary

It starts in a bar, where else, and Gary (Houston Rhines, the Sisterhood) sits at the bar and orders a vodka rocks. A woman, Shauna (Keep Chambers), sits with him and mentions that her car has broken down. Gary is in town for a meeting and offers to drive her home and though she feigns reluctance we do notice that when she phones her friend (to say don’t pick her up) she actually doesn’t call. Cut to a pool and she goes underwater to go down on him, he starts to twist in agony as the water turns red. As she surfaces, she reveals sharp piranha teeth.

Sof Puchley as Lexi

Richard (Bobby Rice) is cooking breakfast when his girlfriend, Lexi (Sof Puchley), comes down. She looks tired and drawn and he explains he didn’t want to wake her. She has, it becomes readily apparent, cancer and is pretty much at end of life. She mentions meeting another cancer patient, Allison (Carrie Overgaard) who is almost cured thanks to experimental treatment. She has arranged an appointment with the Doctor, Sinclair (Shary Nassimi). He makes her promise to talk over what he says before deciding and goes to work. At work he discovers he has been passed over for promotion in favour of Jeff (Nathaniel Moore), who writes 'sexier' reports.

vampiric breasts

Lexi meets Sinclair and decides to go for the treatment – he has shown her an aquarium full of piranha and explained the treatment involves injecting piranha DNA. She calls Richard and says for him not to disturb her and so he goes for drinks with Jeff. Jeff and Richard meet Allison and Shauna. Jeff leaves with Allison, Richard blows Shauna off as he is monogamous. Jeff meets his end, of course, and we see that as well as piranha teeth in her mouth, her breasts also open and have such teeth – attacking with three mouths.

piranha teeth

The next day Lexi seems a million times healthier. At work, Richard gets Jeff’s promotion (as Jeff doesn’t turn up at work and plagiarised his reports), is questioned by the police over Jeff’s mutilated body and discovers Lexi has left him to go and live in a commune with the other piranha treatment women. As the film is just under an hour long the plot lurches from main point to main point with speed. The cops are sceptical and yet don’t fancy Richard for the crime. He knows what’s going on awfully fast. Richard learns from Sinclair himself that piranha’s need heat and can be killed by ethanol glycol (though a bullet sems to do the job just as well.

melting

So, with regards the ethanol glycol – some goes in the pool and a piranha woman in it seems to be being electrocuted until she turns into some kind of swamp thing (and still needs shooting). The other odd bit of lore was the idea that rain water will make a piranha woman transform and then melt – why that happens is anyone’s guess. This is just throwaway silliness but we get vampire like women (they seem to be able to control their transformation unless induced by an outside liquid source), with vampiric boobs and a short, unobtrusive running time lurching to an unsatisfying denouement. Cheese will carry it so far, however, 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On Blu-ray @ Amazon UK