Directed by James Cameron
Written by Charles H. Eglee and James Cameron
Starring:
- Tricia O’Neil as Anne Kimbrough
- Steve Marachuk as Tyler Sherman
- Lance Henriksen as Police Chief Steve Kimbrough
- Ricky Paull Goldin as Chris Kimbrough
- Ted Richert as Raoul, the Hotel Manager
- Leslie Graves as Allison Dumont
Release Date: August 14, 1982
Rating: 
Who else is willing to admit that murderous flying piranhas provide far finer entertainment than Joe Dante’s watered-down Jaws imitation? If your cinematic palate leans toward the gloriously disreputable, you already know that this so-called “trashy” sequel is the real party, leaving Dante’s film looking almost timid by comparison.
Let it be stated unequivocally: Piranha II is the fevered brainchild of Ovidio G. Assonitis, not the cinematic neophyte James Cameron. Though Cameron’s name adorns the credits, his actual involvement was mechanical, even servile, his greenhorn direction wholly governed by the imperious Greek-Italian producer orchestrating the shenanigans. Beyond its aquatic settings—perhaps the lone trace of what would one day become “Cameronian”—the film is a deliriously grotesque Italian exploitation tapestry. Giannetto De Rossi provides his trademark carnival of viscera; Stelvio Cipriani unleashes a rich, baroque score that sways like a Spaghetti Western shipwrecked in tropical waters; Roberto D’Ettorre bathes every frame in rustic, oily textures; and, lurking behind every decision, the unmistakable crudity of Assonitis reigns. He may not be as nasty here as in his Video Nasty days, but the guy who helped birth the Italian cannibal craze is very clearly steering this insane ride of winged, flesh-ripping piranhas. This sequel’s delirious vision of aerial carnivore chaos is unmistakably his.
The plot here is a half-rotted stew of soap-opera detours and busted genre leftovers, all thrown together like someone dropped a stack of scripts into a blender. Our battleground is the Elysium Hotel, a Caribbean resort where sunburned tourists get ambushed by hyperactive, genetically scrambled piranhas that can chow down in the water and swoop in from the skies. Lance Henriksen shows up as the local cop with an estranged wife (Tricia O’Neil) and a kid to worry about, but even he looks like he’s trying to figure out what movie he wandered into. Cameron, still a rookie, shoots the whole Italian-style mess with quiet surrender—no shame in that. Yet as the lewd jokes begin to overshadow the creature carnage, the film reveals its true nature: a riotously tasteless comedy whose vulgarity becomes strangely endearing. And still, my preference for Cameron’s unofficial debut over Dante’s original doesn’t stem from its irony-drenched humor but from its unexpectedly classical B-movie spirit. Imagine this same creature feature, scrubbed of its leering asides, emerging from 1950s Hollywood—it wouldn’t seem out of place among the cherished oddities of that golden age of monsters. But released in the 1980s, it’s inevitably saddled with the stigma of low-rent exploitation.
Piranha 2 is ludicrous in precisely the way The Wasp Woman is ludicrous—full of the buoyant, shameless absurdity that only a mutant-creature fantasy from the 1950s could conjure. If you approach it with that same cartoonishly elastic logic, its catastrophic narrative suddenly feels purposeful. Well, perhaps not purposeful, but certainly delightful: the film resurrects the juvenile thrill of a B-movie that knows its own artificiality and never once pretends to transcend it. Flying piranhas tearing out throats with vampiric bravado? An opening underwater sex scene? This is pulp bravado at its finest. Cameron and Assonitis’ misbegotten aquatic romp remains one of the many American riffs on Jaws, yet its unmistakably Italianized sensibility—gaudy, shameless, hyperbolic—gives it a character none of the others possess. It’s not wholly good, but it is wholly cool.
