Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 25, 2008, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Back in my misspent early youth, I first caught 1978’s Barracuda on late-night TV, and my preteen self was impressed by the way a movie that started as another Jaws knockoff also came to incorporate scientific/government conspiracy themes—rather ambitious, it seemed at the time. Not long after, I discovered the joys of Variety’s Cannes and other film-festival issues, which in those days were hundreds of pages long and were chock full of ads for all manner of lurid genre flicks in various stages of development and production. One that especially caught my eye touted a movie called Please Don’t Eat the Babies, with a graphic of a cockroach-like critter erupting from the ground. I really wanted to see that one, but the subsequent years offered no evidence that it had ever actually been seen to completion.
So imagine my excitement when Dark Sky announced that it was unearthing Barracuda (heretofore visible only on a very sparsely distributed VHS tape) on a DVD double bill with something called Island Fury…which proved to be none other than Please Don’t Eat the Babies under a new title. At last I could revisit that obscure entry in my favorite subgenre (nature on the rampage) and see if Fury/Babies could live up to the promise of that long-ago promotional art.
I guess it was inevitable that disappointment set in on both counts.
Barracuda (subtitled The Lucifer Project), the second fright feature by the Florida-spawned filmmaking team of Harry Kerwin and Wayne David Crawford (the latter of whom would go on to bigger pictures like Night of the Comet and Valley Girl), does indeed weave Parallax View-esque paranoia plotting through its tale of the titular fish becoming especially feisty and chomping on swimmers near the coastal town of Palm Cove. Marine biologist Mike Canfield (Crawford) leads a group of his students to investigate toxic dumping in the area by the “Jack Chemical Company,” which gets him in trouble with the local law. Still, the night he spends in jail leads him to meet cute sheriff’s daughter Liza (Roberta Leighton), who becomes his ally in attempting to prove that the Jack Co.’s activities are jacking up the aggressiveness of the barracuda. But the greatest threat turns out to be human; “They are us,” Mike says, attempting profundity in the midst of a rather unenthusiastic climactic gunfight.
Crawford and Kerwin’s script makes a creditable attempt at working on a broad dramatic canvas and dropping hints throughout the story about what’s really going on. Yet so much time is devoted to seemingly pointless dialogue, and Kerwin’s direction is so flat and visually undistinguished, that tedium sets in before the halfway point. The underwater sequences (helmed by Crawford) have a bit more panache, though there’s a sameness to them after a while: The camera tracks along the ocean bottom with scuba divers or spies on the legs and feet of hapless swimmers, intercut with footage of real barracuda, before rubber mockups dart in (there’s no credit for the FX) and the sea turns red. Dark Sky’s transfer looks quite good and presents the movie in fullscreen; it was evidently shot open-matte, with no apparent loss of picture information on either side and quite a bit of headroom in numerous shots.
Island Fury turns out to be Please Don’t Eat the Babies-plus…or -minus. The Babies footage, lensed around 1983, was appended by producer Mardi Rustam in 1989 with new framing scenes, and the resulting movie starts with two young women being endlessly chased through a Chinatown bazaar by a pair of almost comically nasty-looking thugs. They’re eventually captured and forced to accompany the goons and their employer to an island where the bad guys believe the girls can lead them to hidden treasure. Cue “flashbacks” to Babies, in which the same girls, here aged 10, accompany four college-aged guys and gals on an outing to that island. There they run afoul of a deranged backwoods family led by the elderly Jebediah, played by veteran Western star Hank Worden, who sadly seems to be not quite all there and conveys not one iota of menace. He takes three of the older youths prisoner, leaving Todd (Ed McClarty) to become one of the most incompetent and insensitive “heroes” in horror-movie history.
In the original Babies, it seems, Jebediah and his kin were cannibals who also fed their victims to oversized insects dwelling on their island. There’s no hint of flesheating in Island Fury, though, and only a couple of random, incongruous close-ups of the bugs, which never interact with the humans. On-line accounts differ regarding the project’s history; some say Babies ran out of money and was never finished until it was incorporated into Fury, while others refer to a Japanese video release of a completed Babies (a YouTube clip of a scene not present in Fury, with a dialogue reference to the bugs, bears that out). It’s hard to say whether the reinstatement of the creepy-crawlers would improve Island Fury as it stands, whose ending manages to be even dumber than what has preceded it—no mean feat.
Extra features exploring that backstory might have been interesting, but there are no supplements to the fullscreen transfer, which is sharp enough to make the distinct visual qualities of the two rounds of filming stand out. The DVD offers the option of watching each movie separately, or as one long “Drive-In Double Feature,” complete with snack bar promos, an intermission and trailers for assorted B-features, including Bonnie’s Kids, The Centerfold Girls and Rustam’s Eaten Alive and Psychic Killer—the latter of which is also coming from Dark Sky in a new edition later this year.
