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.