Saturday, January 2, 2010

Piranha II: Flying Killers (1981)

It's one of those days. Whatever I put in the player, it sucks. So it's one of those days that the only thing I can see is something that bores me. Piranha II: Flying Killers is one of those movies. I stayed away it from for many years, until now. And it wasn't has boring as my memory told me, but really... there's a lot of other much better movies to spend a boring saturday with.

Storywise it's nothing new. A beach resort, a skeptical owner, a grumpy police, a teenage love-story, some naked women and killer-fish. What I could see, nothing is connected to the first Piranha-movie, which I think is a fantastic little movie - and it gets even better listening to the commentary track with Joe Dante and Jon Davison. One thing's for sure, James Cameron - the official director of the sequel - will never make a commentary for this one, which is a pity because he probably has some interesting stories to tell about it and how the movie was taken away from him. 

Shit, I'm trying to stay away from the subject here, maybe because I have no idea what to write about it. The characters is empty, but the actors do their jobs and isn't bad. Lance Henriksen is the police and looks very young here. He's also the most realistic character, the rest feels like caricatures or something from a Benny Hill-sketch. Yes, the last thing also mean that there's a lot of nudity here, which I guess some people might like. 

Personally I enjoyed the piranha-attacks the most. Gory and bloody (but I'm sure they're been trimmed, either by BBFC or the company itself - this is MIA's old british dvd-release. Fullscreen and the quality is not that good, but acceptable) and some fun and nasty make up-effects to. More gore than in the first one at least, but instead it lacks of charm, love and good characters.

I would love to see the first cut of the movie, the one that Cameron (as the legend says) cut in secret until he got caught by producer Ovidio G. Assonitis. According to IMDB there's such a version release, but I guess it's just false information: "The original, 1988 laserdisc featured James Cameron's much better "director's cut", missing nearly 20 minutes of footage, and having many scene re-edited and reordered".

Yes, crap movie. But it was kinda fun, I have to admit that.

1 comment:

mamoulian said...

Ok, I can see how now famous actors and directors don't want to get their hands dirty on the little nasty films that earned their living before they got all high and mighty... But it's kinda sad they don't want to share their wittisisms and otherwise interesting minds to the likes of us cultists... And the film itself? Well... ;-D