James Cameron: Piranha II: The Spawning (1982)

You don’t have to look too far beneath the waves to see aspects of a James Cameron film lurking in the waters of Piranha II: The Spawning. Not that deep diving will make the finished product look much better or bring it up to the standards of Cameron’s other works. It’s a bad film, with an undercooked concept, some lacklustre action, and a few too many scenes of naked titillation. Piranha II is Cameron’s first film, but it’s not truly a James Cameron picture, even if it’s essential for understanding his development as a director.

To fully understand Piranha II and its influence on Cameron, you have to know the story of its troubled production. Piranha II was a work for hire. Having cut his teeth doing special effects for Roger Corman productions for a couple years starting in 1979, Cameron seems to have bought into Corman’s attitude towards filmmaking, which is that you say yes to directing something even if you know it’s bad. So when Greco-Italian executive producer Ovidio Assonitis offered him the job of directing this low-budget sequel to Corman’s Piranha, Cameron said yes. According to the Corman school of thinking, the only way to prove you can direct in Hollywood is to direct, so you say yes to anything, even if it’s smut.

However, even with low expectations, things didn’t go according to plan. When Cameron showed up in Jamaica to shoot the location scenes for the film, he found a ramshackle production with an all-Italian crew that didn’t speak English and hadn’t secured locations a week out from filming. According to his account in Rebecca Keegan’s biography of Cameron, The Futurist, Cameron grabbed some petty cash, hired a local to drive him around, and hand-wrote contracts to secure the locations, including a real morgue with real dead bodies inside it for the film’s late-night morgue scene.

Cameron did what he could to rework the script by Charles H. Elgee (who he’d later create Dark Angel with) and shoot compelling scenes, with Assonitis breathing down his neck the whole time, refusing him access to the raw dailies and micromanaging every set-up. Eventually, Assonitis fired him and took over directing himself. Accounts differ as to how long Cameron actually worked on the film. In The Futurist, Cameron claims he was fired after only five days of filming, while in other accounts, he claims to have spent around two-and-a-half weeks shooting in Jamaica. Other, non-Cameron, accounts say he was there for all the principal photography and was fired before reshoots.

Regardless of how long he worked on it, the film was taken from Cameron and finished by Assonitis. Cameron famously wanted his name taken off the print, but he didn’t have the money at the time to get lawyers to force Assonitis to remove it from the final cut. So Assonitis kept it there, knowing he had to have an American director to honour some contractual obligations about distribution with Warner Bros.—apparently not knowing that Cameron was Canadian, not American.

After filming was complete, Cameron flew out to Rome to meet Assonitis and watch the final cut. He hated it and allegedly broke into the editing room to recut the final print over a few weeks in Rome, until Assonitis caught him and reversed his edits. In the end, Piranha II: The Spawning (entitled Piranha II: Flying Killers for the international release) was made to Assonitis’ specifications. Another fellow Roger Corman acolyte, Miller Drake, had been hired to direct Piranha II prior to Cameron, and had subsequently been fired to make way for Cameron. Now, Cameron was treated like Drake before him. He was overruled and helpless to watch his first credited feature be mangled by a producer and released by a porn distributor (Warner Bros. bailed on releasing it).

Knowing all we do about the troubled production and Cameron’s own hatred and disowning of the work, why even bother dissecting this film? Because even amid its dysfunction, as both a production and a final product, we learn about Cameron’s approach to narrative and character, his penchant for special effects, and his obsession with authorial control.

Like Corman’s Piranha before it, Piranha II: The Spawning is a naked ripoff of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. It follows Anne (Tricia O’Neil), a diving instructor, and Steve (Lance Henriksen), her estranged sheriff husband, who try to protect the guests and staff of Club Elysium, a Caribbean coastal resort, from the flying piranhas that have spawned in a nearby sunken wreck. It sounds ridiculous and lives up to the billing.

The opening scene of the film, with its POV camera of a predator dispatching two lovers trying to get it on while diving into an underwater wreck, openly recalls the first scene of Spielberg’s film—albeit with more lurid nudity and absurd violence. The opening images of gentle waves and the ocean at night recall the final shots of that famous opening scene of Jaws. The underwater footage during the opening credits continues the Jaws ripoff approach, with the credits themselves shifting as if they’re projected onto moving waves. The film’s narrative preoccupation with reuniting Steve and Anne and strengthening their family unit (they also have a son) adds to the film’s Spielbergian approach.

But Piranha II does not pretend to be as good as a Spielberg movie. The film is deliberately low-budget, Euro-influenced genre trash. It’s meant to titillate with nudie shots and excite with silly special effects. The viewer isn’t supposed to find it good, only to have fun with it as a late-night diversion at some drive-in double feature. There are real artists involved in its production, not just Cameron, but also special effects supervisor Giannetto De Rossi, who worked on Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2—in which a zombie famously bites a shark. The gelato-flavoured sheen of the horror in Piranha II recalls films by Fulci and Mario Bava, even if it lacks their artistry. So if Hatchet for a Honeymoon or Zombi 2 are B-grade, Piranha II has to be C or D. Even grading on that scale, it’s not a great time.

But if you look past the film’s silly moments to examine the film against the wake of Cameron’s subsequent career, you start to see genuine Cameronian elements break through the surface. Most obvious of these elements is the credibility of the underwater scenes. 

Cameron is perhaps cinema’s foremost underwater obsessive. The Abyss, Titanic, and his three underwater documentaries, Expedition: Bismarck, Ghosts of the Abyss, and Aliens of the Deep, all take place largely underwater, and Cameron has spent much of his time off from filmmaking diving to the ocean floor, including his record-breaking descent into the Marianas Trench. So in Piranha II, we see an early interest in the ocean and the authenticity of scuba diving footage into the wreck of the fictional U.S.S. Dwight Fitzgerald.

Beyond the underwater filmmaking, the film also sets the template for a few of Cameron’s approaches to story and character. In fact, the film supplied him with one of his favourite character actors: Lance Henriksen, who brings a no-nonsense credibility to the role of Steve, the island’s sheriff and Anne’s estranged husband. Despite the ludicrousness of the film’s plotting, Henriksen never condescends to the material. He mostly plays it straight, whether begging O’Neill’s Anne not to approach the wreck or expressing his exasperation with Ricky G. Paull as their son, Chris.

O’Neill’s Anne herself recalls, in moments, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator films and Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Aliens. Like Cameron’s other two memorable female protagonists, Anne is pragmatic, physically capable, beautiful, and maternal—the characteristics that define Cameron heroines. When she gears up with a speargun to plant bombs into the sunken wreck, we can’t help but see the promise of those future Cameron heroines—the perm helps complete the visual prediction.

The film’s set-up offers a cross-section of late 1970s vacation destination society, presaging Titanic and its interest in the social arrangements of an ocean liner and its microcosm of the pre-war world, albeit on a much smaller scale. There are the rich guests, poor staff, expats and locals, military agents trying to clean up their mess, and pragmatic workers trying to do their best. Even the sinister resort manager predicts the incompetence and single-mindedness of the stakeholders in the Titanic’s doomed voyage. It’s not elegant, but the variety of the people on screen is no accident. 

The film also displays Cameron’s early distrust of yet fascination with the military and corporations as well as his paradoxical blend of 1970s hippie anti-authoritarianism with a reverence for badass individual heroism. The mess at Club Elysium is caused by secret military experiments aboard the U.S.S. Dwight Fitzgerald. The experiments lead back to the Vietnam War, so it’s just another example of American imperial excess ruining people’s lives, much like the napalm of the Cambodian campaign. When Tyler (Steve Marachuk), a guest who’s smitten with Anne, is revealed to be one of the biochemists who worked on the piranhas, he begs Anne to “go through the proper channels.” Anne’s response is quintessentially Cameron and could’ve been spoken by Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley or Jake Sully: “Fuck the proper channels. Either you help me or get the hell outta my way.” When Steve actually contacts the government, he gets nothing but denials, a confirmation of Anne’s gut instincts. 

In a Cameron film, the military (Avatar) or an evil corporation (Terminator 2: Judgment Day) or a mix of the two (Aliens, The Abyss) usually starts the mess, and it’s up to a badass individual with a gun to fix it. The political commentary is not elegant in Piranha II: The Spawning. It’s hinted at in lines and plot details, but never truly incorporated into the structural whole. But it’s there, just as it will be in all the Cameron films to come.

On a strictly storytelling level, the film also shows evidence of Cameron’s inventive use of low budget special effects. Sure, the climactic piranha attack looks ludicrous, with rubber piranhas flying along strings that aren’t even disguised from the camera. But an early attack in the morgue has the piranha bursting out of the sunken chest cavity of a corpse in order to rip apart the nurse. It’s sudden and explosive and clearly inspired by the chest busters and facehuggers of Alien. (Cameron would refine this very technique when working on Aliens.) 

Also, in a few rare moments, it does actually use Jaws as inspiration for the filmmaking. A late scene when a deputy is pulled away into the bubbling waters is the most Spielbergian, even Hitchcockian, of the film’s many attack scenes. We don’t see the piranhas, only the deputy’s wounds. The silence, the inevitability of the action on screen, and the terror of him being pulled into the sea by an unseen monster actually delivers the sort of excitement the rest of the film lacks.

There’s also the convincing banter between Anne and Tyler in the early scenes—it doesn’t hurt that Steve Marachuk looks a bit like Bradley Cooper. His berating of a fellow diving class member who insults Anne—”You go to asshole school or something?”—and his exasperation at Anne slipping the morgue door open with a credit card—”Oh Christ, we’re breaking in.”—would fit in another Cameron film, the kind of affable dudeness of the humour and the willingness to be corny.

These are the film’s saving graces, which make Piranha II: The Spawning worth exploring on a purely experimental level, as a prediction of what’s to come for James Cameron as a filmmaker. What holds it back is its puerile humour, sloppy filmmaking, and leering camerawork (with Assonitis reportedly behind the camera). According to The Futurist:

Assonitis had fired Cameron so he could sit in the director’s chair himself—it wasn’t a coincidence that all the scenes of topless women bouncing on the decks of yachts had been shot in the last half of the schedule, and that Assonitis had cast those parts himself without Cameron’s knowledge, using Penthouse centrefolds.

Cameron appreciates beauty in his films. There’s an eroticism to his camera, whether it’s showing the muscles of Arnold Schwarzeneggar in The Terminator, watching Jamie Lee Curtis’s striptease in True Lies, or displaying the balletic grace of the Na’vi running along trees in Avatar. But his camera admires more than it leers, never shrinking the character into just a body or an object to be ogled at. But Piranha II is full of such ogling shots of asses and bikinis and nipples. It’s juvenile and smutty. A producer like Assonitis would say that’s the whole point of a film like this, but Cameron is a director who always wants to do more.

The same applies to the budget. Many great films have low budgets. Directors would always prefer to have more money on hand than not, but it’s about what they do with their limited resources that makes or breaks a film. Piranha II seems embarrassed by its shabbiness. In the early scenes, characters get into random conversations fixated on the notion of cost and the shabbiness of the resort, as if the film is trying to excuse itself for filming in such a lacklustre location. At least Cameron is able to make the most of an exploding helicopter or the scuba diving scenes to the sunken wreck—they take advantage of the resources available to the filmmakers.

Perhaps beyond the corny special effects and absurd plot, the worst element of Piranha II is the mean-spirited humour. There are corny jokes like the horny older guest who tries to get it on with the lifeguard: “You know what the doctor said killed my last husband? Excitement.” Not a gangbuster, but the sort of joke you’d expect in a film like this. But when the film goes onto a narrative detour to watch a stuttering, goofy chef tricked into stealing food for two sexpot babes with a stolen sailboat, you just watch counting down the seconds until the next scene. The bad slapstick can’t save it.

And the humour about the foppish manager, Raoul (Ted Richert), is a true embarrassment. The film’s version of the mayor in Jaws, Raoul wants to keep the tours and water sports going despite the danger to the guests. That’s all well and good, as it keeps to the idea of the villains exploiting danger and being driven by corporate greed. But every statement out of Raoul’s mouth seems to beg the viewer to hate him for being a queer. In his first scene, he mentions that he’ll be personally judging the muscle man contest on the beach. Later, after Steve attempts to close the beaches, he says to him, “You’re sticking a red hot poker up my ass.” As if we didn’t get the joke, he elaborates later on: “Fiscally, I’d be cutting my nuts off.” We get it, he’s gay. Very funny….

These sorts of elements are common in films of this sort, which delight in bare breasts and killing off people the film posits as losers. You’ll find it in slashers and frat comedies and most of the fare that’d play late nights at the drive in. It’s not a matter of ethics, but simply being a bore to watch. It’s disposable shlock, the kind of thing you could never imagine James Cameron making, since what came after was always an event, a well thought-out attempt at cinematic spectacle, giving the viewer something they’d never seen before.

That’s the sad thing about Piranha II: The Spawning. It gives us so much of things we’ve seen before, from the Jaws plot to the bad effects to the low-rent gags and nudity. But therein lies the film’s usefulness as a blueprint of sorts for Cameron. It’s not a stretch to say that his first film showed him what not to do on a feature film. The film’s bad special effects seemed to commit Cameron to providing state-of-the-art work in every subsequent film of his. The lack of final cut and editorial decision made made him ruthless when it comes to creative control, cinematic perfection, and seamless spectacle. He learned his lesson well and good and never forgot it, becoming a notorious perfectionist when it came to getting what he wants on film.

As Rebecca Keegan writes in The Futurist, “The torment Cameron went through over his failed first directing effort would lead him exactly where he needed to be.” The film’s a failure, but it’s essential. James Cameron would’ve never become “James Cameron, King of the World” without it.

3 out of 10

Piranha II: The Spawning (1981, USA/The Netherlands/Italy)

Directed by James Cameron (and Ovidio G. Assonitis, uncredited); written by Charles H. Eglee (credited as H.A. Milton), based on characters created by John Sayles and Richard Robinson; starring Tricia O’Neil, Steve Marachuk, Lance Henriksen, Ted Richert, Ricky G. Paull, Leslie Graves.

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