We spliced in genes from different species to create the ultimate killer organism.

Piranha II: The Spawning

(1981)

(SPOILERS) James Cameron’s first movie, except he protests that he was replaced after two-and-a-half weeks (or was it eight days?), shut out of the editing room, and generally disabused of any notion he had a say in the finished picture. And yet, he can’t escape this sequel to Joe Dante’s cheap and cheerful original as his generally cited debut, however divested of it he may be. Jimbo also cared enough to (apparently) produce his own edit for a little-seen laserdisc version. I had next to no desire to revisit this particular scene of a crime, but in the interest of fairness to his oeuvre and a thorough exploration of the works of the Jim-meister, I steeled myself and… Piranha II: The Flying Killers, or Piranha II: The Spawning, as you will, is a very long 90 minutes.

Piranha II plays less as a horror movie than a combination of bad ‘70s porn, where every other scene anticipates a major unfurling, and bad ‘80s vacation comedies, where the holiday makers have only raunchy antics on their minds and you’re dreading the arrival of Rodney Dangerfield. As for the salient respective ingredients of those genres, there is nudity in Piranha II, but not nearly enough to be a selling point. And in terms of laughs, they are there, but only of the unintentional, flying fish variety, since they go straight for countless jugulars and produce fountains of spectacular rouge.

In its vague defence, however, Piranha II is blessed with Lance Henriksen in a not-quite lead role. In the early scenes at least, he’s looking like he’s going to wrestle the movie singlehanded from the rubbery airborne poissons, passing through the proceedings entirely unblemished, and exuding cool in the way only a guy with a receding hairline who has made the most of bit parts throughout the previous decade can.

Lance might seem overly dismissive towards the views of estranged wife Anne (Tricia O’Neil, the very definition of a yummy mummy, so much so their son Chris, Rick G Paul, seems worryingly enamoured of her, at least until he finds someone his own age), but we have to stack up the evidence here. Anne is evidently a prototype for Cameron’s tough bitches, I mean strong women, albeit without the muscles and weaponry and desire to act in as disconcertingly masculine a fashion as possible to prove how highly competent a representative of her gender she is.

But she’s also unscrupulously reckless in her desire to prove herself right, and there’s absolutely no consequence or repercussion from this. It’s directly down to her breaking into the morgue that an attendant is killed (in admittedly hilarious fashion; but still, that’s no excuse) and there’s a general sense that everything she does is because she’s a wilful, headstrong heroine who must be right, rather than because there are good sensible reasons for her behaviour. So she’s your basic Cameron leading lady, just marginally less finessed than usual. Her travails are ultimately in aid of the restoration of the family unit, something we’ll see more of in Aliens, Terminator 2 and True Lies.

Also present and correct is some decent underwater photography, another of Cameron’s great devotions (and likely to be revisited once again in one of the Avatar sequels, if rumours are true). Steve Marachuk offers a solid turn as a stud-come-weasel working for unscrupulous corporations, who are yet again responsible for a scientific experiment gone awry (they’re all alike, unless they’re providing backing for your next movie that is , eh Jim?) And, also as per the first Piranha, the event organiser refuses to listen to the warnings of imminent peril.

Along the way we meet a yacht owner straight out of Magnum (Ward White) and an obnoxious hotelier (Ted Richert). There are some occasionally gruey moments (notably a half-eaten character stumbling from the ocean), and some downright abysmal interludes (anything involving Arnie Ross’ Mal the Cook), but the main fault of Piranha II is that it’s so soporofic, even though it’s over before most Cameron movies properly begin.

Cameron came aboard after the original director, Miller Drake (who provided second unit on Alligator, and is mostly known as a visual effects guy) was nixed; it’s ironic that he started out on a “series” built on a firm sense of humour, since his subsequent movies illustrate, if nothing else, that this isn’t his forte. Not to say he can’t come up with decent gags (as Hudson in Aliens illustrates) or that “the finest flying killer fish horror/comedy ever made” isn’t a good way to turn the movie’s failures into a self-deprecating positive (minus the comedy bit). But True Lies proved that going wholeheartedly down the comedy route announced his deficiencies for all to see, as does the comic business in something like this. The only way for Piranha II: The Spawning to have (ahem) flown would have been to embrace its absurdity the way Joe Dante could, and Jimbo just isn’t that kind of guy.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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