Bradford Dillman

The San Francisco police sends detective Harry Callahan to a Northern California town where he uncovers a string of murders and resolves to bring the perpetrators to justice.

David (Roger Richman) and Barbara (Janie Squire) are two young backpackers who happen upon a military post that seems to be abandoned. They discover a large man-made reservoir and decide to go skinny dipping. Within minutes they are attacked and consumed by some underwater presence, their death screams attracting the attention of somebody still inside the military facility. Maggie (Heather Menzies-Urich as Heather Menzies) is an investigator hired by Barbara's parents to find their daughter and her companion. With financing from her employer Earl (Richard Deacon), Maggie travels to the mountainous area where the two were last seen, and she seeks out the cabin of Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman). Paul is a backwoods type who lives in a log cabin with his young daughter, who is away at summer camp. Maggie convinces him to take her to the military facility, and they discover the pond. Paul notices that the water is salty. Exploring the buildings of the complex, they find a laboratory with numerous strange animals, including a bizarre, lizard-like creation. Maggie decides that it's possible that David and Barbara drowned in the pond, and she takes the initiative to drain the pond to find out. She flips the switch, and suddenly they are confronted by a white-haired man (Kevin McCarthy) who lurches at them in a panic, trying to shut off the drain switch. In the melee, he is knocked unconscious. Paul and Maggie go outside to the empty pond and find the bones of David and Barbara caught in the drain. When the mysterious man attempts to steal Maggie's jeep, he crashes it and injures himself even more. Taking him down to Paul's cabin for the night, the man rambles on about 'razorteeth' and that they are all in danger. The next morning, Paul and Maggie load the man onto Paul's homemade log raft and they set out downstream to take him to town. When he awakens, he reveals that he is Dr. Hoak, and he explains that Paul and Maggie have done something terrible. The pond contained a breed of mutant piranha, which Hoak had been developing for use in the Vietnam War. After the war, the military pulled the plug on the operation, but Hoak remained and continued experimenting with the piranha at the facility after it was closed down. The piranha begin to claim victims immediately. Paul's friend, Jack (Keenan Wynn), dies when the piranha chew off his feet while he sits on the edge of a dock; he crawls away and bleeds to death. Downstream, a father and son are out fishing on the river; the father is killed while trying to fix the outboard engine from under the boat when he is pulled under the water and eaten alive. The boy clings to the capsized boat, but it is gradually sinking into the water. Paul, Maggie, and Hoak come upon the scene and the doctor leaps into the water to save the boy. He manages to lift the child onto the raft, but the piranha attack him. Paul and Maggie pull him out of the water, but his wounds are too severe and he dies before he can offer them any advice about how to stop the killer fish. Paul is especially concerned about reaching the summer camp where his daughter, Suzie (Shannon Collins), is located. The camp is downriver from the piranha, and it is only a matter of time before the fish reach it. There is also a new resort further down the river that is about to open for business. Grogan and Maggie make frantic phone calls to both places, but their warnings are dismissed as fiction. Eventually, the military gets wind of the piranha and they send Dr. Mengers (Barbara Steele) with a group of soldiers to investigate. At first, Mengers denies the piranha exist, but Maggie soon realizes that Mengers and Dr. Hoak were once lovers, and Mengers represents the military's desire to cover up the incident. The soldiers confine Maggie and Paul to their camp, imprisoning them and refusing to let Paul contact his daughter. Maggie and Paul escape the camp, but they are detained by the local police before they can get anybody to listen to them. Paul manages to contact the head counselor at the camp, Mr. Dumont (Paul Bartel), but he dismisses Paul's message due to his reputation of being an alcoholic. Maggie and Paul manage to break out of jail by subduing the officer who is left to watch them and escape in his squad car. The next day, the piranha attack the summer camp. Suzie, who is afraid of the water, is hiding on the shore when the other kids and counselors begin to panic in the water. Suzie bravely tries to rescue her two friends, counselors Betsy (Belinda Balaski) and Laura (Melody Thomas Scott (as Melody Thomas)) by rowing out onto the lake in a rubber raft. She collects Laura, but Betsy falls into the water and is consumed by the piranha. Paul and Maggie arrive at the camp too late, but after ensuring that Suzie is alright, they race off to the resort. The owner Buck Gardner (Dick Miller) refuses to answer their phone calls (under the advice of Dr. Mengers and her commanding officer who is there), but eventually the piranha attack and mass casualties result as dozens of people are wounded or eaten alive by the vicious fish. Mengers' superior is one of the casualties when he falls in the water as people cling onto a ferry boat and he is eaten alive along with several others. During the drive in the stolen police car, Paul remembers that the water in the test pond was salty, but the water in the rivers is fresh water. They conclude that Hoak had bred the piranha to survive in either salt or freshwater, hence if the piranha reach the ocean, they will contaminate the world's waterways, and probably the oceans as well. Paul and Maggie arrive at the resort and commandeer a speedboat to take them down the lake. Paul plans to poison the fish with pollution from a nearby sewage plant, but when they reach the plant by boat, it is now underwater, having been flooded. Paul intends to swim for it, tying a rope around his waist and instructing Maggie to take off if he has not surfaced within two minutes. He swims down to the plant and manages to get inside, opening up the tanks containing the raw sewage, but the piranha approach and attack him. Maggie finishes her countdown and takes off, pulling Paul to safety. Paul is wounded and in shock, but alive. He is tended to by Maggie and Suzy at the resort as the military and other medics tend to dozens of dead and wounded people. As the film closes, Dr. Mengers speaks to the media, assuring everyone that there is nothing left to fear of the piranha who have been killed by the sewage waste at the edge of the lake. But, the open-ended question leaves the end up in the air: have the piranha really reached the ocean as was once feared?

Scientist James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman) delivers his wife, Carrie (Joanna Miles), to a church sermon at a country parish, then drives to work at a local university. During a sermon about God's "gentle caress," a major earthquake strikes and nearly demolishes the chapel, but no one is killed. While the parishioners evacuate, Carrie grabs her Bible and calls James from a payphone, thereby missing her ride home with Henry Tacker and his son, Kenny. As the two men approach the Tacker farm, their pickup truck explodes in flames. Young Norma Tacker (Jamie Smith Jackson) watches in horror as her father and brother burn. That night, Norma is retrieved from her vigil inside the burned truck by her boyfriend, Gerald Metbaum (Richard Gilliland). Both are unaware that the vehicle is hosting killer cockroaches. Returning home, Norma retires while Gerald hears strange noises and surveys the property to discover large, incendiary cockroaches near a fault line created during the earthquake. A cat is killed when a cockroach com-busts on its head. Sometime later, Gerald visits the biology class of his former professor, James Parmiter, who lectures that modern man has lost his innate ability to communicate with other living creatures. When the students leave, the two men eat lunch at the cafeteria and Gerald reports his entomological discovery at the Tacker farm, the earthquake's epicenter. When James argues that fire-producing insects do not exist, Gerald shows him the dead cat. James goes to the farm with Gerald and is astonished that the cockroaches are able to make fire by rubbing their legs together. He also observes one cockroach feeding on ashes. Soon, the town is besieged by fires in most of its buildings and James calls the mayor to warn him about the bugs, but the mayor is unavailable. Back at the university laboratory, James's colleague, Mark Ross (Alan Fudge), examines a cockroach specimen and reports that the insects eat carbon and are indestructible to any blunt force. James wonders how the cockroaches travel from place to place, since they cannot fly. At the Parmiter home, Carrie prepares to leave for the Tacker funeral with Mark's wife, Sylvia, and James returns in time to say goodbye. Alone in the house, James is visited by a handyman named Charlie, who reports strange noises coming from James's car. James discovers cockroaches feasting on his engine and orders Charlie to leave. He then lures the insects into a trap with a freshly burned newspaper. Meanwhile at the Tacker funeral, Carrie gives Norma and her surviving brother, Tom, a handkerchief that Henry gave her at the church just before the earthquake struck. When Norma, Tom, and Gerald return home to pack up the house, Norma answers the telephone and a cockroach, nesting in the receiver, attacks her ear. Gerald extracts the bug with a burned newspaper and Norma is sent to the hospital. Meanwhile, James drives to the farm, which is now smoking from the fires triggered by the cockroaches. He impales one of the insects, causing it to explode. Excited by his discovery, James phones Mark and they meet at the laboratory. James explains that the bugs are slow-moving because of atmospheric pressure, and they are suffering from decompression sickness. Before the earthquake, the cockroaches lived entirely underground in a dense atmosphere, but now they are struggling to stay alive. James suspects the insects are ancient creatures trapped underneath the Earth's surface during a prehistoric volcanic eruption. When Mark adds that the cockroaches cannot reproduce and that they will soon self-destruct in the Earth's atmosphere, James is despondent. Sometime later, James asks Gerald to build a large pressure tank. Gerald hopes that James' experiments will help Norma recover from the cockroach attack and agrees. Back at the Parmiter home, Carrie discovers a surprise birthday cake that Sylvia hid in the garage. She brings it inside, unaware that a cockroach is clinging to the box. The insect attaches itself to Carrie's shirt, then sets her hair on fire, causing the woman to ignite. Later, Mark arrives at the laboratory to find James paralyzed with grief. Seeking to make sense of the tragedy, James returns to the Tacker farm and sees the burned shells of deceased cockroaches. He captures a sole surviving insect and places it in Gerald's newly crafted pressure tank, muttering, "I will make you live." He then introduces an average household cockroach into the tank and the two bugs copulate. Sometime later, Gerald and Norma return to the Tacker home, but he refuses them entry. James is angered to learn that the location of his hideout has been leaked to Mark. The couple leave food for James, then drive away. Days pass and the cockroach mating is successful. However, the female "fire bug" guards her egg case and James is unable to perform experiments. Several more days later, the egg case increases in size and James transfers it out of the pressure tank and into a box. There, the egg hatches numerous infants that grow to adult cockroaches within five hours. When James reintroduces the mother cockroach to her offspring, they kill her and James sobs. Soon, cockroaches escape from their box and feast on James's uncooked steak; he discovers that they only consume raw meat and eat collaboratively, as a "single unit." That night, James awakens to find cockroaches sucking blood from his chest and secures them in the pressure tank. Over the next several days, James suspects that the cockroaches listen to his voice and watch him, as well as form symbolic patterns with their bodies to communicate messages. Late one night, he discovers that the insects have escaped the tank to form the letters of his last name on the wall, along with the message: "We live." Terrified, James realizes the bugs have great powers and runs from the house to get them more food. Meanwhile, Sylvia takes a taxi to the Tacker home, intending to give James the Bible that Carrie held so dear. She screams upon finding the house infested with cockroaches and a cassette tape of James' voice, repeating: "I've gone too far." As the insects burn her face, Sylvia runs outside and dies in the barn. Feasting on their kill, the bugs procreate and climb into the fault line. When James returns, he discovers the insects missing. That evening, Mark arrives, looking for Sylvia, and notices that James has become mentally unhinged; unshaven and disheveled. Although James orders his colleague to leave, he promises to return to the university in a few days. With Mark gone, James is horrified when he discovers Sylvia's body. He grabs the Bible and tries to phone the authorities, but the line has been severed by the mutant cockroaches. Hearing the insects, James wanders outside to see a bright red light emanating from the fault as giant cockroaches, now equipped with wings, fly away. Although James tries to escape into the house, the creatures smash through the window in pursuit and set him and the whole house on fire. As James tumbles out of the front door in flames, he falls into the fault and the cockroaches follow. The fissure closes, trapping the cockroaches underneath the Earth's surface yet again.

During post-WWII McCarthyism, a diametrically opposed couple come together only to find out that genuine friendship and physical attraction is not enough to overcome fundamental societal beliefs. Set in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, a love story involving two markedly different people. Katie is an idealistic, uptight, Stalin-loving political activist. Hubbell is an easy-going, athletic, All American-type, and a talented writer. We see their different personalities affect their relationship and how they manage despite the differences... —grantss Opposites attract when, during their college days, Katie Morosky, a politically active Jew, meets Hubbell Gardiner, a feckless WASP. Years later, in the wake of World War II, they meet again and, despite their obvious differences, marry. Hubbell wants to be a screenwriter, so the two move to California despite Katie's objections. They prosper there, but as the Hollywood blacklist looms, Katie's activism threatens her husband's reputation. —Jwelch5742 Impossible to resist the beguiling charm of her insouciant and incredibly handsome White Anglo-Saxon Protestant classmate, Hubbell Gardiner, the impassioned Jewish secretary of the 1937 Young Communist League, Katie Morosky, finds herself, more and more, drawn to him. But, even though Katie's logic tells her that a relationship between two polar opposites is doomed to fail, instead, she lets herself get carried away in an enthusiastic romance that will eventually lead both lovers to marriage, and Joseph McCarthy's not-so-glamorous 1950s Hollywood. Now, Katie's principles and her uncompromising political views stand in the way of what should be the perfect love affair; however, life is nothing less than unpredictable. Can Hubbell and Katie turn the clock back? —Nick Riganas

A man who returns to his hometown for a funeral may have a much larger purpose in life than those around him can see. John Kane (Sidney Poitier) always seems to know when there will be a death in his family, despite not being in touch with them, and returns to his hometown. He has come home again, to be at his sister's deathbed and funeral. There is a strike in the town, and the police think he is a labor agitator. His well-used passport and unusual book collection only fuel their suspicions. But the town's doctor has always noticed that John is different, and thinks he has a larger purpose in life.

As the Allied armies close in, the Germans decide to blow up the last Rhine bridge, trapping their own men on the wrong side. But will it happen? In the last days of World War II, the Allies look for a bridge still left standing across the Rhine, in order to launch an assault on the centre of Germany. The last bridge which meets both sides' criteria's at Remagen, and both sides race to reach it first, but for very different purposes. —Anthony Hughes <husnock31@hotmail.com> March, 1945. The allies are closing in on Nazi Germany. The problem for the Americans and British on the Western Front is crossing the Rhine River, a natural obstacle to the invasion of Germany. The Germans have blown all of the bridges on the Rhine, except one - the bridge at Remagen. US forces are headed for it, spearheaded by a platoon lead by war-weary Lt Hartman. The Germans have sent a top-notch infantry officer, Major Kreuger, to take over the defense of the bridge and blow it up. The confrontation between the two could hasten the end of the war, or result in tens of thousands more casualties. —grantss