MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
I guess Streaming has finally outpaced both the commercial TV of my youth and the days of video rental stores, if it can summon forth, as from the vasty deep, a fifteen-year-old monster-mash crapfest I never heard of.
Now, ordinary when I raise the specter of--
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
-- it's usually because I'm revealing detailed plot points. But for PIRAHNAWOLF, I'm going to reveal the story that the crap-movie probably could have told adequately, at least as far as crap-moves go:
Reporter Lexi Glass (Carrie Long) thinks she may have hit the big time. Stuck doing routine local news in Anytown U.S., she hears about two brutal slayings of blonde women, and witnesses think they heard the howling of a dog or wolf. While investigating, Lexi starts having weird dreams. Sometimes she feels herself experiencing the serial murders, as blonde women are attacked by a werewolf-killer. Less often, she also dreams herself swapping spit with a handsome bearded man she's never met. The two forebodings come together when Lexi learns more about her family background. Her mother had an affair with a man who was a werewolf, and by him she conceived a son, also a werewolf and a half-brother to Lexi. Lexi realizes that she's been experiencing the murders through her brother's eyes, and when she meets him in his non-werewolf persona, she's immediately attracted to him, dinner and a movie be damned. So they swap spit, because evidently as the child of her mother Lexi just can't resist those wolf-boys. However, she realizes she really doesn't want either to protect a killer or to raise little lupine babies, so she strangles Wolf-Brother to death without so much as a "one who loves him enough to understand" sentiment.
Now, that's a serviceable if unremarkable plotline for a werewolf movie, and maybe if I'd read a summary that covers those points, I would have watched that movie more quickly than about a dozen other lycanthrope streaming-flicks that I haven't yet watched. But I have to admit I was lured in by the title PIRAHNA-MAN VS. WEREWOLF-MAN, even though I didn't expect much.
Trouble is, the two artistes behind this dreck thought they'd enhance the simple premise of their werewolf story not only by shoehorning in a Pirahna-Man (who's also Lexi's father), but also a convoluted origin in which (1) the original werewolf killed all hands aboard a nuclear submarine, (2) the submarine gave off nuclear waste that contaminated some pirahna-eggs, which (3) Lexi's father ate so that he became a "piscathrope." ALSO, the werewolf tends to kill lots of people in Lexi's social circle, a la Original Frankenstein's Monster, though not for any particular reasons I could suss out. AND ALSO, Lexi has some sort of spirit-guardian who wears a papier-mache mask over his face and who guides Lexi through some of her backstory-revelations, as well as enlisting Lexi's horny roommate to serve as the reporter's guardian.
On occasion I like flicks that throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix, but here it's just low-energy and tiresome. All the extraneous material makes me wonder if the writers thought they were doing an absurdist take on monster-movie tropes-- and that leads me to label the film an "irony." It's also a combative irony thanks to a few minutes of fighting between the title monsters, though it's a poor example of both categories.
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