Should It Count? - Piranha II: The Spawning
James Cameron has disowned his schlocky B-movie directorial debut, wishing it excised from his canon. Should it be?
It’s always interesting to see what primordial piece of art comes first. Writers can have small, successful books before they come out with something that’s a broad-appeal smash, same with directors.
At times, though, artists need the grand canvas to make stories in public. This can mean (unfortunately) falling on their face. Or… maybe sometimes they hit it out of the park on the first try. This is especially fun with film, where so many directors’ first films can be just whatever they manage to get financed. To get the experience and make the mistakes, knowing that if it works there will be another shot. No matter how haphazardly they get it across the finish line, it’ll be something they can learn from. It won’t define them.
There’s hardly a better example of this than James Cameron’s directorial debut: Piranha II: The Spawning. Having come up watching movies in the 70s, Cameron famously entered the film industry after seeing Star Wars in 1977 inspired him to join the film industry. By 1978, he’d scraped together enough money to make a short film he wrote and directed called Xenogenesis, and by 1980 had worked in special effects and art direction enough to step in as director on the aforementioned Piranha II when the film’s original director quit.
Cameron has since disowned the project. He squabbled with the producer and the man subsequently locked his director out of the post-production process. Without doing the edit on the film, the film is not in whatever vision he might have had. And… fine. He’d much rather everyone remember him as the dude who came out of nowhere with The Terminator (1984).
Unfortunately, that’s not reality.
The Corman of it all
Piranha II comes out of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking. A brilliant producer and distributor, Corman is a fascinating figure of mid-20th Century filmmaking. His name is usually notorious when it comes up. The entire reason for Corman’s success was a keen understanding of what (if included in a movie) could guarantee a certain level of box office return. Most studios build their successes off talent (like actors and such), but that can get expensive really quickly. Instead, Corman knew that putting a pair of guns in a movie would guarantee X dollars at the box office, and including this type of car would separately add this much, and so on. It wasn’t an exact science, and they weren’t adding like… millions of dollars in guarantees. But with enough of those minimums, Corman could make films cheap enough that there’d be a high probability of making his money back with just enough profit to keep funding this enterprise in perpetuity.
Of course, this cheap B-movie quality means that Corman’s films are not exactly luxury experiences. I, personally, don’t enjoy watching movies so contentedly existing at such a low price point… but this freedom meant Corman was capable of training an entire generation of filmmakers. He could take a chance on complete unknowns as long as they were hitting his seemingly arbitrary objectives. Boxcar Bertha (one of Scorsese’s earliest films) came from Corman producing, and Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) got his start cutting his teeth by making a handful of Corman-backed projects.
So when the director of Piranha II fell through, it makes sense that the production would allow James Cameron to swoop in and be the director guy if the situation called for it. It couldn’t hurt, and any movie is better than no movie.
Dude loves the water
Watching Piranha II, it’s a schlocky B-movie that sequelizes a low-budget Jaws ripoff. The story is weak and the characters are hardly memorable. It’s difficult to see Cameron at all in the film.
… except in the underwater photography.
Cameron’s love of the ocean is one of the recurring themes and motifs throughout his work. It’s The Abyss and Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water and a smattering of documentaries and also his own journey down into the Marianas Trench. In Piranha II there’s a crackle to the way he shoots the world beneath the surface and it’s the sort of thing that you can only really tell after his other work. When listening to the Blank Check episode on this (which is one of the rare episodes I listened to before watching) they talked extensively about how this is true. But even in seeing it, it’s clear that this is a man who truly comes alive in that. And nowhere else.
… There’s really nothing else redeeming about this movie. And I’m including the role for a very young Lance Henriksen.
It belongs in a museum
Now… it’s not like Cameron could have saved this movie. At the very best, a more final, Cameron-forward version would maybe be a bit more dynamic throughout. But no one is really capable of escaping a budget this low, not when even the script has aspirations of “acceptable enough for B-movies”. At best this maybe could have gotten to a C-, when really it’s sitting near a D because it has…. basically no redeeming qualities. Outside of seeing prototypical Cameron learning how to make things look cool in exotic aquatic environments, there’s no reason to watch this. This is a movie for the crazy people who think their lives are somehow richer for being total completionists for the sake of completionism.
Were it not Cameron’s credit in the title card, literally no one would even care.
Unfortunately that doesn’t stop the truth of the matter here. Cameron’s debut will always be Piranha II, but that’s hardly going to define him. It doesn’t take away from the potency of the rest of his career nor does it mean he doesn’t deserve the Oscar for Titanic or the fact that three of the top four grossing films of all time are movies he’s made. Hell, having finally watched this it’s not like doing so made me appreciate Cameron more in some new or weird way. It’s mostly just an odd curio.
An artists’ career is the sum of its many many parts. Cameron’s career is so massive that Piranha II is at best the equivalent of of the 4th grade Missions project my mom handed me when I was home the other weekend. I might have gotten an A on it (and my first GameBoy if I remember right), but it still existing actively adds nothing to the world except a little extra less-space. And I wrote the damn thing (and toiled, and suffered probably. I don’t remember).
Lucky for Cameron, the rest of his work is so good that it means everyone can basically forget this all exists and we can instead focus on his absolutely bat-out-of-hell start in 1984.
Any others?
For a different type of completionism, here’s a couple of directors who utterly smashed it on their feature debuts, making incredible films considering it was their first time out. These are in no particular order and off the top of my head.
Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs
The Wachowskis - Bound
Drew Goddard - The Cabin in the Woods
Rian Johnson - Brick
Joss Whedon - Serenity
Jordan Peele - Get Out
Sam Raimi - The Evil Dead
I’d probably vote Jordan Peele for the best out of all those? But persuading me is probably much easier than you think. Who (either listed or otherwise) is the director you think has the straight-up best feature film debut?