Barracuda (1978)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: You’d think barracudas, right? You’d think wrong!

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• There’s an underwater establishing shot that goes on for 10 minutes.
• Two divers get attacked by barracuda and lose their limbs.
• Some people are diving in a cove so some developer tells his son to take Eugene and get them away. I hope Eugene is an orangutan.
• Some dick steals lobsters then gets eaten by barracudas. A dog finds his head on the beach.

  

  Lucky bastard…

• All the scenes are either boring, pointless or go on way too long. Or all three.
• There’s some kind of underlying subplot of people in town becoming very irritable. I know exactly how they feel.
• I’ve broken my record for number of exasperated sighs in a movie.
• A scientist calmly takes some fish out of a freezer in a scene that lasts a couple of minutes and means nothing to anything.
• Our hero, Mark, flatly turns down the hot female lead for sex for no reason at all.
• So chemicals dumped into the ocean from the plant are making the barracuda killers. Where the fuck are the sharks?
• This is seriously one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It goes nowhere.
• So apparently people are becoming irritable on purpose! It’s called The Lucifer Project and it truly makes zero motherfucking sense.
• This movie is barely about barracudas.
• Turns out this movie is really about diabetes. I am not kidding.
• Best line: “How long have you been drinking bottled water, BEN?!”
• Mark drives a dune buggy. On the street.

Dune buggies are awesome, but it seems like they wasted a golden opportunity not having Mark drive a Plymouth Barracuda.

• There are three scenes of barracuda attacks.
• Mark explains the plot to the doctor… whose journal he got the plot from.
• This is almost as bad as Birdemic.
• This movie was clearly named The Lucifer Project initially, then they changed it to Barracuda to capitalize on Jaws.
• So at the end, cops shoot Mark and the sheriff. This makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Is It Actually Scary: About as scary as a documentary on sea otters.

How Much Gore: Some severed limbs and a head, because apparently the common barracuda can bite through human bones.

Best Scene: *MAJOR ENDING SPOILER*This can also be considered the worst part, but to me it’s the best because it ends things just the way I was hoping for:

Worst Scene: The entire movie is a bad scene, but I have to go with the part where our “hero” figures out the whole evil diabetes plot. It’s so brutal to sit through you’ll wish there were barracudas in your beer that you could swallow and destroy you from the inside:

Any Nudity: Nope. Mark c-blocks any chance at nudity.

Overall: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… it’s still pretty safe, because barracudas aren’t that frightening. However, I was in Bermuda a few years ago and went power snorkeling, which is like regular snorkeling except you hold on to this little motor with a R.O.T.O.R. and it pulls you through the water instead of you having to do all that unnecessary swimming. The sea was murky that day, my friends. As I was powering along, I stopped to admire some coral, and when I turned around I saw three barracudas hovering there, devilishly grinning at me. I froze in my underwater power scooter tracks, and that’s when their leader took the opportunity to strike… Well, it just slowly swam forward at me, but it was staring at me the whole time. If I hadn’t pressed the gas on the Power Snorkler 3000 and gotten the hell out of there, I likely wouldn’t be in possession of most of my limbs today. And that, my friends, was scarier and more intense than anything in this awful movie. Maybe if I also had diabetes coupled with my barracuda event I could relate to this movie more. If you do have diabetes and are on Medicare, don’t watch this movie, call Liberty Medical, they can help you live a better life.

Score: 1.5 shots of insulin (out of 10)