Artists of all stripes repeat themselves, whether through themes, motifs or hues, and James Cameron is no exception. So the question I've been asking myself as I count down the days to Avatar's debut is this: just how much of the long-awaited 3-D space blockbuster was predicted by the man's inauspicious debut, 1981's Piranha Part Two: The Spawning?
The notion sounded kind of silly, even to me as I dragged the musty old VHS from its dust-coated shelf in the Bad Movie archives. After all, how could a sequel to a Roger Corman Jaws rip-off that was made for a pittance nearly 30 years ago have anything - anything -- to do with the quarter-billion dollar Movie That Will Revolutionize Cinema As We Know It™?
But from the very first frames, Piranha Part Deux bears what could be considered Cameron's signature stamp. We join the action as a couple descend into the deep blue unknown, diving to a naval wreck off the coast of a Caribbean island. For a cheapie knock off, these underwater scenes are surprisingly good and a little taste of what we'd see in The Abyss, Ghosts Of The Abyss, Aliens Of The Deep and, of course, Titanic. Anyway, here, because we're firmly in B-movie territory, our intrepid underwater couple get nekkid, get it on and then get munched by swarming piranha fish.
The attack is but the prologue to... about 30 minutes of hijinks at Club Elysium. This is a pleasure-island resort whose attractions include horny Jewish swingers, a Mr. Muscle Contest and - foreshadowing! - the Annual Fish Fry Beach Festival, which sees landlubbers club gather by the Full Moon to snatch up the local grunion fish population as they come up unto the sand to spawn.
Amid the bacchanal, though, we're introduced to our heroes. They may be bare-bones characterizations, but damn if they don't carry through to Cameron's later work. There's Anne, the curly-haired, sexy-smoking and take-no-shit marine-biologist who's not too many galaxies removed from Ripley in Aliens - and thus, by extension, also related to Sigourney Weaver's botanist Grace Augustine in Avatar. Anne is estranged from her husband and the father of her son, island cop Steve, played by frequent Cameron ensemble player Lance Henriksen. In an arc that has a whiff of True Lies, she'll continually defy his instruction to "go home and sit on your hands." Then there's Anne's dalliance, Tyler, who appears to be a playboy but turns out to be a biochemist for the shadowy government agency who thought it a good idea to puree the DNA of grunion, flying fish and piranha for their Aliens-like weapons program.
There are specific moments, too, that Cameron would revisit. When a piranha pops out of a corpse, we're firmly in Giger-chestbursting-infringement territory. For professional reasons, Alien had been on Cameron's mind at this time. That's because before directing this film the budding effects artist had not only designed a "spaceship with tits" for Roger Corman's Battle Beyond The Stars but also done second-unit and production design on the schlockmeister's 1981 Alien rip-off, Galaxy Of Terror. Thus the ending of Piranha Part Two -- a boilerplate Ridley Scott riff in which Anne crawls through underwater airvents while a timer counts down on the explosives set to blow up the naval wreck the killer fish call home. Other scenes echo down to Cameron's later work almost subliminally, such as the bimbo who goes down into the blood-boiling waters with one disco finger raised, a la Arnie at the end of Terminator 2, or when Tyler says to Anne of hard-ass Steve, "You know that robot?" -- which is exactly what Henriksen would play in Aliens.
Piranha Part Two: The Spawning - which went by the even better international-release title of Piranha II: The Flying Killers - isn't any sort of neglected masterpiece. With the exception of Henriksen's always enjoyable tough-guy shtick, the performances struggle to reach adequate. While the underwater cinematography is polished, the land sequences are on par with what you mind find in a Porky's sequel. As for the creatures of the feature? The little biters don't so much fly but are rather a) launched like tennis balls on a practice court or b) flap around like vampire bat from a 1930s horror. Why the fish squeak is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's their protest song at having to chow down on so much Plasticine-looking gore.
Thing is, while Leonard Maltin declared "You would have to be psychic to have spotted any talent from James Cameron in this picture," it also could've been so much worse. The future Oscar winner and all-time box-office champ got this first directing gig on the say-so of Ovidio G. Assonitis, the Italian schlockmeister best known for having been sued by Warner Bros. for ripping off The Exorcist with 1974's Beyond The Door. Assonitis - who also used the nom-de-cheese Oliver Hellman -- had been on the Galaxy Of Terror set on the day that Cameron infamously demonstrated his low-budget ingenuity by electrocuting maggots on a prop hand for an effective nickel-and-dime gross out.
Cameron had an inkling of what he was in for with Assonitis but signed on for it anyway, hungry for the experience. But when he arrived in Jamaica, he discovered he had an all Italian-speaking crew and that they were already deep into pre-production. Demonstrating the micromanagerial hands-on style and bluster he'd become renowned for after he made it big, Cameron set about re-writing the script and personally redesigning the rubber fish the Italians had fabricated. For his efforts, Cameron was banned by Assonitis from seeing the dailies, lest he discover his producer had been slyly shooting T&A inserts. He was summarily fired 12 days into the schedule. Cameron soon came to suspect Assonitis had planned his termination from the start, only needing an American director to work a certain number of days to satisfy the picture's U.S. distribution contract.
While it's not true that Cameron broke into the editing suite to steal back his picture, he did convince Warner Bros. to let him recut Piranha Part Two into the almost-sentient version that was seen in American cinemas and on home-entertainment formats. "I can honestly say that Piranha 2 is the best flying piranha movie ever made," Cameron has said on more than one occasion.
Which brings us back to the question of how much of his debut will resonate into the biggest gamble of Cameron's career since, well, last time. In truth, it's hard to say without seeing Avatar -- but some corollaries are obvious. Pandora's atmosphere is toxic, necessitating the creation of Avatars -- perhaps the equivalent of a futuristic scuba suit -- and these creatures are hybrids, created by a puree of human and Na'vi DNA. That's pretty Piranha Two. Same goes for the fact that Pandora's skies are filled with unlikely flying creatures whose special effects have yet to convince everyone. And on a technical level, the motion capture and additional dialogue recording processes needed to turn actors into aliens must've given Cameron at least a few flashbacks to having to edit around the crappy dub jobs done on some of Piranha's Italian extras.
All long bows, you say? Well, fair enough. We have no doubt that even if Avatar can't quite live up to the hype, it won't offer anything quite so ridiculous as the spectacle of beachgoers staggering around the sand as they hold rubber fish to their necks. That said, it's hard not to think of the Na'vi "look" when you're confronted with a few key faces from Piranha Part Two: The Spawning. And for that, it's a Bad Movie We Love.
Michael Adams is the author of Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies, which traces the year he spent in search of the world's worst movie. For more: www.badmoviebook.com.