I know you all know already, but I’ve just seen that Piranha movie on cable (in eye-popping 2-D!), and I was delighted to see it open with a scene of Richard Dreyfuss getting eaten by hungry piranha fish! It ain’t a shark, but it’ll do! I always felt cheated at the end of Jaws when he pops his head out of the water, like that monster shark (Bruce, I think his name was) would forget all about him after munching his way through that steel cage to get him: yeah, sure! From what I understand, he got eaten in the script, but they changed the ending just to be lame. Lame! So I’ve always wanted to see him get his comeuppance! And how great is that, the fact that he agreed to do it? It’s like he’s book-ending his career with great man-eating fish horror movies! And he’s correcting the error of the Jaws movie: that of him not getting eaten by the titular menace. Awesome!
Yes, I was so disappointed, and found it so unrealistic, that Richard Dreyfuss’s character didn’t get eaten by the shark in Jaws, that I used to think about it in other movies sometimes. Like when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I used to fantasize about how great it would be if the aliens were calling him and luring him to their spaceship to invite him inside just so that they could feed him to some giant great white shark they had abducted from the ocean because they had felt cheated that he wasn’t eaten in Jaws. That would have made it a much better movie, and we all could have understood why the aliens had come all the way to Earth! And then, when they shot extra scenes and padded the ending for a re-release of the movie, I was so disappointed they didn’t add that scene in at the very end! But after seeing the beginning of this new Piranha movie, I like to think that Richard Dreyfuss was pulling for that scene to be made for Close Encounters, and that he was bitterly disappointed also when it wasn’t included. So he swore off of alien movies for a while after that. (That’s probably the only reason why he’s not in E.T.!) And also, obviously, that’s why he did that scene in Piranha: to make up for it!
Oh, but there are other movies, too, that still remind me of that issue. Like, for instance, in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, when Uma Thurmond threw that shark into that guy’s apartment, I was thinking: “Oh! Do it to Richard Dreyfuss too!” And in those other Jaws movies, I was always wondering why he didn’t join the cast just to get eaten first. Then every time there was a water-related horror movie, he could have been the guy who gets killed by the monster first! Think of all the work he could do for the SyFy Channel! I’ll bet Giant Shark Vs. Mega Piranha would have had way more box office draw if Richard Dreyfuss had been in it! I mean, if it wasn’t direct-to-video, that is. And what about Tintorera? What, does he think he’s too good for crappy Mexican Jaws rip-offs? The nerve of some people! And what about Deep Blue Sea, and Blue Demon? (<The shark movie, Blue Demon, not the Mexican masked-wrestler movie; but he’d be great in one of those, too!) It’s like he forgot that he got his big break in a killer shark movie! Shouldn’t he at least appear in every other killer fish movie just to show his appreciation? Well, maybe he’ll be in all of them from now on! We can only hope…
