Piranha II: The Spawning Review

Every filmography needs its bottom, and this is a very deep one. Cameron was hired off Roger Corman's effects bench to direct an Italian financed sequel about genetically altered piranha that fly, was fired within a couple of weeks by producer Ovidio Assonitis, and later claimed he broke into the Rome editing room at night to see what had been done to his footage. He has spent decades calling it the finest flying piranha film ever made, which is the kindest thing anyone has said about it.

The creatures are rubber puppets flung at actors on wires that the lighting does nothing to hide. The resort setting is a series of interchangeable rooms, the performances are dubbed into flatness, and the plot stalls for long stretches on a diving instructor, her estranged husband and a teenage subplot that goes nowhere. The one flicker of a future is underwater, where the photography has a patience and a sense of pressure that nothing else in the film possesses. Two years later the same man made The Terminator, which remains the strangest leap in the medium.