Piranha II: The Spawning / Flying Killers (International Title)

    Never in my life have I had any intention of watching this movie. Then I did some research on ‘DeepStar Six’ and noticed this was listed as James Cameron’s directorial debut and my interest perked right up. It doesn’t take much digging to learn what a clusterfuck this movie was behind the scenes, how after the relative success of the first ‘Piranha’ (directed by Joe Dante) the rights were sold to an Italian producer who threw together some financing and tore through directors before going with James Cameron, how Cameron basically had no authority on set, either was or wasn’t quickly fired but was stuck with his name on the film for contractual reasons, how the edit was a butchering of the existing footage, all that. The thing is this sort of thing happens all of the time in small-to-middling semi-independent productions like this, the only reason anyone’s bothered to look up these stories is for the same reason it caught my interest, the involvement of James Cameron.

Wait, no it didn't.

    

    So let’s just take it as read that the making of this movie was a shitshow and see what effect this has on the finished product. For about the first third of the movie I’d say surprisingly little. It’s not any good at all but it at least looks and sounds like a movie and moves from scene to scene in a fairly orderly fashion. The longer it goes, however, the more the cracks start to show. Motivations aren’t properly justified, knowledge is shared between characters without establishing how, tones whiplash wildly from drama to soap opera to the lower common denominator comic relief from scene to scene and sometimes within scenes, characters flit in an out of the movie in increasingly random fashion, and by the last twenty minutes of the movie it’s gotten so bad it’s clear they’re attempting to construct some kind of a narrative out of whatever footage they have.

    If the first ‘Piranha’ was just ‘Jaws’ but with piranha, this is just ‘Piranha’ except they fly now. They’re also not actually piranha but another kind of fish but frankly who cares. Killer flying fish is actually a pretty decently bonkers premise, you could do a lot with that. About the only thing you absolutely couldn’t do would be to make a straightforward horror movie, so of course that’s what they attempt to make. The three main stars of the movie Tricia O’Neil (who would later have a bit part in ‘Titanic), Lance Henriksen, and 70’s Bradley Cooper, play their characters completely straight. Henriksen in particular gives this movie at least twice the performance it deserves. The other various side characters function mainly as comic relief but in a way that’s completely separated from the rest of the movie, they just offer standard 70’s style ribald hijinks and beyond-pathetic dialogue. They and their scenes could almost all be cut and the movie would lose nothing except for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe keep the few that get killed by the flying piranha.

    If you’re looking for some hidden clues of the talent that Cameron would go on to display just three years later in ‘The Terminator’ then don’t bother because the best that can be said for his work here is that it seems competent. There are some underwater scenes that are shot fairly well for what they are, there’s a scene where Tricia O’Neil is walking down an empty street and getting hit on by 70’s Bradly Cooper that is well done enough that I noticed despite my dawning horror that we were supposed to interpret his neediness and inability to take a straightforward ‘no’ for an answer as charming, and the very wise decision to keep the flying piranha off screen as much as physically possible.

    So I suppose we have to address the flying piranha. I get the underlying idea: the problem with underwater danger is that the solution is to simply get out of the water, which is why movies like these, even good ones, first have to do the heavy lifting of justifying why people just can’t stay out of the stupid water. So the solution: make it so they can attack on land too. The problem with that is that these are not large fish and again the solution is simple: go inside. Or just go further away from the shore. Even the characters who are fully aware that there are flying deadly fish around still go out on boats or wander the beach at night.

    I will not be kind to the special effects. There’s a reason we don’t get so much as a glimpse of the deadly fish until fully forty minutes into this ninety minute movie. Before then we have jumbled cuts of characters in the water, first-person underwater movement, a kind of whirling sound, then close-ups of thrashing and a really bad red color overlay to indicate blood. Something we don’t even get that, just a character swimming off the screen then a cut to another character finding the body. But eventually they have to produce the goods. Before and after attacks they look like little zippy plastic fish on wires. When they are attacking they look like hand puppets going after peoples’ throats. Just like in ‘Ghoulies’ there’s a lot of actors attacking themselves by aggressively hugging props. I don’t think we ever see more than about four at any given time and even in the underwater climax it looks like they wired a bunch in stiff formation and just dragged it past the lens as fast as they could.

    As I said before the movie starts breaking down by the end. Characters who have never met will wander into scenes together and trade looks that we’re supposed to somehow translate. A firm time limit of ‘tomorrow morning’ is given at one point before having subsequent scenes flick back and forth between full night and full day. The final climax is blowing up a sunken boat that apparently holds the nest (?) of the killer fish without ever having established that fact. My personal favorite is Lance Henriksen, having taken a helicopter to look for his missing son, finds him in a dinghy about forty feet from his wife’s boat above the sunken ship with a very badly established timer ticking down. He broadcasts to his son to stay put, flies over to nearer his wife’s boat, jumps out of the helicopter which promptly crashes and explodes and is then forgotten, boards the boat, motors it over to the dinghy, gets his son aboard, then sits and waits for ten minutes for the explosion to go off. I have tried parsing this sequence of events several times and can only conclude that they decided they needed the last shot of the movie to be the husband, wife, and son hugging after the explosion and this was the only way they could come up with to get there.

    You’d think whatever meager entertainment you could wring from this movie would be from the cheap flying piranha but no, they’re just hand puppets or models on strings. The way that time and space unraveled in the edit bay is about the only enjoyment I could find. The rest is either boring or grating by turns. James Cameron has said he doesn’t really view this as a movie he directed and I agree with him. His movies may not be the most complex story-wise but they fit together like clockwork and do exactly the job as intended. This ends up as a tangled ball of nonsense that leaves characters and story threads dangling all over the place and ends in the most perfunctory way possible.