Piranha Part 2: The Spawning(1981)d/James Cameron

Take it from ol' B.W.,even the biggest Hollywood hotshot directors have movies under their belts they'd like to forget.Take James Cameron,for example.Sure,he's responsible for big budget spectacles like Aliens,True Lies,The Terminator,and Titanic,but his humble beginnings include Galaxy of Terror(1981) and this particular ridiculous piece of dogshit.Don't get me wrong,I have fond memories of watching it in the rental days,and there are enough elements in place that it manages to entertain despite its shortcomings,but let's not pull punches here:This movie sucks all kinds o' bloated pungent donkey balls.So much so that it's a minor miracle that Cameron went on to have the career he has,I know if I was hiring a director for MY motion picture and he walked in with a nice professional-looking resume that had this movie on it,I'd second guess myself over hiring the bucciaolo to hold my boom microphone.That said,let's reflect on the positive aspects of the film:Lance Henriksen in his pre-leather wallet days,Italian goremeister Gianetto De Rossi admirably assassinates several characters(we won't break his balls about the carnivorous flying fish effects just yet),genre vet Stelvio Cipriani's excellent film score,and of course, Leslie Graves' underutilized D cup gashingas hidden in an eighties-tastic half shirt.If she broke those puppies out,we'd be looking at a different review,my friends.

Even Chief Kimbrough(Lance Henriksen)smirks at the idea of flying piranha hybrids.
At the outset two divers decide to have themselves an aqua-fuck next to the sunken remains of a ship,before they're torn to pieces by hundreds of unseen predators.Their bodies are discovered by a professional scuba instructor and single mom named Anne(Tricia O'Neill)while on a dive with a group of tourists.One of her students,a herman named Tyler Sherman(Steve Marachuk)has a fire down below for her,but her ex-husband happens to be the island's own police chief Yarbrough(Lance Henriksen) investigating the mysterious dual demise in the murky depths,and keeping his former partner on a short leash.Meanwhile,her son scores himself a job as first mate on a pleasure boat for a stuffy old snob who doesn't know his own prick from pumpkin butter about boating,and... AND... his bangin' daughter who's got bountiful busoms just a-burstin' out all over the freakin' place.It's gonna be a good summer,as DeNiro once said in a much better movie.Anne convinces Tyler to break into the morgue to take photographs of the dead bodies,and he obliges,figuring the stunt will score him some easy wizard's sleeve from the curious milf.A cleaning lady bursts in on their hijinks and chases them,before(here comes the "Holy Saint Xenobius" moment,wait for it!) a toothy flying fish flies out of a gaping wound in the corpse's midsection and chews the black woman's throat out before smashing out a window and flying off(!!!).Yeah,I'm rubbing my eyes over here,too.

This diver's got a loverly smile,courtesy of makeup wiz Gianetto "Zombi 2" De Rossi.
Yarbrough discovers his ex-wife's credit card at the crime scene the next day,and when he shows up to question her,she's sleeping off a sympathy fuck with Tyler.Meanwhile,two pirate-esque bimbos cheat a poor retarded stuttering resort chef out of a box of supplies before the flying death-dealers make a meal out of them.Anne's son sneaks off with the pillow chested crewmate in a rowboat,and Tyler comes clean about really being a genetic engineer staying at the resort to try and monitor a lost cannister of hybrid piranha/flying fish he'd helped develop.And just in time for the resort's annual fish-stravaganza,where guests call the fish from the ocean's surf by tiki torch in the moonlight.The hotel manager,Raoul,is more concerned with a succesful party than the impending bloody decimation of his tourists.Sniff,sniff,I smell the Jaws formula in here somewhere.The police chief sets out in his chopper to look for his fleshhound son and his concubine,and Anne and Tyler dive to the wreckage to set off explosive charges to rid the island of its winged threat once and for all.The mutant fish fly out of the water and turn the tables on the hotel guests,flapping,biting,and squeaking like bats in the process.Tyler eats carnivorous mutant death at the jaws of his own aquatic Frankenstein-esque creations,but Anne places the charges and after Yarbrough inexplicably crashes his own chopper into the ocean(?),he scores a boat and saves his ex-wife and the two kids just in time for a giant underwater trademark Cameron explosion,saving the day.Sound ridiculous?It is.It really is.

Smoking ganja would prove fruitless for this poor bastard.
In defense of De Rossi,always one of my favorite makeup artists,his gore is top-notch as always.His boxy-looking "fish" which clunk clumsily through the air like Science Patrol spaceships from the old Ultraman television series and resemble winged trout with choppers,can't really be blamed on him.Look at the assinine script he was given to work with,ferchrissakes.Producer Ovidio G. Assonitis allegedly gave Cameron no freedom,only allowing the director to film the movie,cutting it himself,and then re-cutting it when he discovered Cameron trying to edit it himself.Cameron,when asked about the film,smirks "I believe 'The Spawning' was the finest flying piranha movie ever made."Whether you consider the guy a talented director or a blowjob hack who made good,you have to admit he's got a sense of humour.Director of the original 1978 movie,Joe Dante's gotta wince when this movie comes up.This entry flaps and squeaks its way to a scale rating of an embarrasing:

Insert your obligatory "head" joke here.