You’d think they would have waited until a fifth or sixth installment before having the fish fly, but no: Piranha II: The Spawning offers a mutant breed with wings and the ability to breathe above water, turning their attacks into something like a drippier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Even so, James Cameron, making his feature directing debut, can’t resist the water. He opens the movie with a shot of a buoy at night, nodding to Jaws, and unsurprisingly makes the underwater cinematography—clear and well composed, particularly around a shipwreck—the strongest aspect of the picture. On land, aside from those attacks, this Roger Corman-produced B movie threatens to turn into a full-on porn flick at any moment, what with all the sexed-up table-setting going on in its first third, which takes place at a beach resort on a Caribbean island (this even includes an odd scene with the heroine in bed with her teen son and a fish). As Anne, a scuba instructor who is among the first to figure out something is wrong (well before the fish fly), Tricia O’Neil offers an interesting prototype for the future female figures in Cameron’s other films: smart, capable, authoritative, and sexual on her own terms. Also notable: the moment a sneaky piranha that has been hiding in a corpse at the morgue leaps out of the body to attack a mortician’s assistant, looking exactly like the emerging little bugger in 1979’s Alien. Cameron, of course, would go on from 1981’s The Spawning to make 1984’s The Terminator and then, in 1986, Aliens. All a vast improvement in quality from what we get here.
(1/4/2023)
