Review: ‘Piranha’ — Joe Dante’s B-Movie Take on ‘Jaws’

On December 18th, 1946, Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. And — so long as his 2022 semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans is to be trusted — the young Spielberg grew up in a middle class setting falling head over heels in love with large Hollywood studio films (the opening scene of The Fabelmans sees a young Spielberg both thrilled and horrified by a train crash sequence in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth, a sequence he attempts to re-create in his first ever cinematic outings at home) alongside a steady stream of mainstream westerns, most notably those directed by John Ford (the same film features numerous posters of Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and concludes with a scene where the young Spielberg stand-in, Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman, is fortunate enough to meet Ford himself and to ask him for advice).

Meanwhile, Joe Dante was born in Morristown, New Jersey just a few weeks before Spielberg on the 28th of November 1946. If his own semi-autobiographical film — the wonderful and underrated 1993 comedy Matinee — is to be trusted, Dante would grow up watching all the kinds of films and engaging in the culture which the young…