‘Frankenfish’ hooks interest in book, TV

The “Frankenfish” — that ravenous alien predator that threatened to walk out of a Crofton pond into Maryland’s waterways last year — has returned to the spotlight in a new book and a cable-TV movie.

Ugly, aggressive and always hungry, the Chinese northern snakehead made international headlines last summer after baby snakeheads were caught in a pond near the Crofton Country Club.

The pond was poisoned and the snakeheads eradicated — but the story lives on.

“It’s the story that keeps on giving,” says Eric Jay Dolin, author of “Snakehead: A Fish Out of Water” (Smithsonian Institution, $24.95), which will be released next month.

“If you set out to [invent] a story like this, you couldn’t have done better,” says Mr. Dolin, who has written four other books. “And the name ‘snakehead’ just gives the image of a nefarious creature. You couldn’t have a better name for it, either. Maybe ‘killer fish,’ but that’s about it.”

The Sci Fi Channel apparently is banking on that “killer fish” reputation in its $2 million feature film “Snakehead Terror,” which is slated to premier this fall.

Filmed this spring in Vancouver and Chilliwack, British Columbia, the film stars Bruce Boxleitner, Carol Alt and William B. Davis (“cigarette-smoking man” from Fox-TV’s “The X Files”). It is based very, very loosely on actual events.

Growth hormones create a school of “freakishly large snakehead fish” that overrun a lake in a small Maryland town and begin traveling on land, attacking and eating humans along the way, according to the cable channel’s Web site (www.scifi.com). The local sheriff tries to scuttle the fish before the entire town becomes chum.

“I’m sure I’ll get a laugh out of the movie, even more than most because I know a lot of the background information,” Mr. Dolin says. “I will be right in front of the television, as I’m sure everyone in Crofton will also be.”

Crofton resident Joe Gillespie, 43, has a special interest in the snakehead movie: The local engineer is a key character in the story — though his role is rumored to be portrayed in the film by Miss Alt, a former supermodel.

Mr. Gillespie; his son, Mark, 12; and Mark’s friend, Jake Harkey, 13, were the first to catch an adult snakehead in the Crofton pond in May 2002. The 26-inch-long fish is mounted in a skateboard shop in town.

But what makes Mr. Gillespie worthy of a TV-movie portrayal was his catching eight baby snakeheads that spawned last summer’s international media circus.

The Washington Times broke the news about Mr. Gillespie’s find on July 9, 2002, and news agencies across the country and around the world followed the story. Mr. Dolin notes in his book that newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations in Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom carried reports about the Chinese northern snakehead.

“What’s so amazing about the story was the depth of the coverage, not only in Maryland, Virginia and D.C., but throughout the country,” says Mr. Dolin, a fishery-policy analyst for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “Every day I would check search engines for information, and new things would come up. It just ricocheted over the world.”

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