Plot
In a top secret government experiment,
the drinking water of a whole city is mixed with a chemical which makes
people aggressive by depriving them of blood sugar. But the dodgy chemical
plant doesn't think straight and pumps the waste out to sea. Naturally there
are still chemicals in the water and a school of barracudas are turned into
man-eating killers.
Review
You'd be forgiven
for thinking that this was just another of those mainly crappy Jaws
rip-offs released in that classic film's wake, right? Wrong! Barracuda could
win the award for "film that goes off on a tangent the most" as it's plot
strafes from the creature feature cheapie to some sort of X-Files
conspiracy flick. It's Jaws meets The Crazies in a bizarre
mixture of genres which may have worked had they not completely forgotten
about the fish when the cover-ups begin.
This one
starts off like Jaws as the barracuda swiftly take apart a few random divers
and swimmers without any real purpose and significance. The barracuda
themselves look very cheap and rubbery and the attacks aren't done very
well. We only get to see some bloody water instead of the barracudas
actually chomping their way through their victims although there is a
severed head shown in one scene. They attack in packs like the piranha from
Piranha and although I'm not familiar with barracudas in real life,
I'm sure they're not anything like this. Coupled with the traditional
monster point-of-view shots that Jaws utilised so well, the barracuda
might as well be any other fish with teeth because they're not really the
focus of the film. In fact the characters spend more time away from the
water than they do near it. It's the most obvious thing in the world to do -
if there's something killing people in the water, then don't go near the
water. But this is a film, not real life, so I expected to see more dumb
people going for swims or fishing.
At about the halfway point, the film switches to
it's The X-Files mode as it turns into a
government conspiracy and cover-up mystery film. Once this is given
priority, the barracuda are hardly mentioned for the remainder of the film
and there's no resolution to their plot. They're not killed off or dealt
with in any way. I guess they're still swimming around there, with their low
blood sugar levels.
It looks like they were just a cheap plot to attract "monster on the loose"
fans such as myself. You can actually see by the other title it went by,
The Lucifer Project, that this has obviously been renamed to cash in on
Spielberg's masterpiece. I was actually wanting there to be some form
of "local festival taking place in which the local mayor wanted to keep the
beaches open despite danger" plot like there is in all of these Jaws
rip-offs. But that was just a cheap ploy and the barracuda are only
secondary to the real film. It's blatantly cheap, false advertising. The conspiracy plot is a complete waste
of time and you just know
which townspeople are in on the cover-up from the way their characters have
been portrayed throughout the rest of the film. The film also ends with a
real twist which came as a bit of a shock to me but looking back I should
have seen it coming. If Barracuda had focused on
the title fish a lot more much like Piranha did and then had the
cover-up plot as the secondary theme then this would have been slightly
better.
Verdict
It's funny that in Jaws, the mayor tells Chief Brody that "You
yell barracuda, everybody says 'huh, what?" Barracuda is a
cheap cash-in which has little to do with killer fish and more to do with
shady federal agents. Barracuda - huh, what indeed.
