Grunion run

Hey, do you think if Alexandre Aja's upcoming Piranha remake does well, the folks in charge'll remake Piranha II?

Probably not. Like The Hills Have Eyes II (2007), it'll be Sequel to Remake and not Remake of Sequel, and blamelessly so.

A throwaway mention of Lance Henriksen yesterday, in combination with recent Piranha research, made me think a mention of his leading turn in Piranha Part II: The Spawning was due. He'd been friends with James Cameron for some time; after Piranha II, Cameron wrote The Terminator with the intent of placing Henriksen in the cyborg role. Tricia O'Neil (he'd put her on a boat again in Titanic) plays Cameron's first heroine in these pre-Ripley, pre-Brigman, pre-Connor days.

Piranha II is basically Private Resort with a few fish scenes. A medley of comic buffoons are occasionally interrupted for a gay joke or fish attack. Also, the fish can fly now.

It's mostly known for being James Cameron's first directorial effort, and while it's a pretty mediocre exercise, don't hold it against Cameron. A Dutch-financed Italian production in English, it was mostly out of Cameron's hands, and he took over mainly to get a DGA credit. He had minimal communication with the Italian-speaking crew, frequent conflicts with executive producer Ovidio Assonitis, and no control over the editing – at least until he broke into the editing room and started working on it himself at night.

New World Pictures was sold midway through the production of Piranha II, and the resulting distribution was sloppy, largely drive-ins and second-run theatres. Unlike the genetically engineered, cross-bred fish, it proved quite unable to fly.

Terror, horror, death. Film at eleven.

After the haunted mall business is taken care of, Alexandre Aja's next project up is a remake of Joe Dante's 1978 Piranha. Aja took over the director gig from Chuck Russell and did a rewrite of the script - seeing as one of the writers of the previous draft was responsible for Good Luck Chuck, this can only be good news.

Joe Dante's (with a script and a cameo by John Sayles) tongue-in-cheek mini-Jaws is a fun enough horror comedy with just the requisite touch of anti-military, anti-science moral. Jaws' enormous success in 1975 is responsible for many similar flicks, and producer Roger Corman commissioned this one as a Jaws derivative, but it's worth mentioning that 1972's Piranha (aka Piranha Piranha, which I'd naturally have preferred as the title of Piranha 2) predates Spielberg's monster.

Piranha is interestingly uneven: the tongue-in-cheek tone seems at odds with the R-rated-ness of the flick; there's a bit of nudity and some gore later on, and the late attacks go on quite a bit longer than the 5- and 10-second churning-water kills of the first half lead you to expect or even be comfortable with. Dante injects humor but doesn't play it all for laughs; Dick Miller and Paul Bartel are ostensibly here for comic relief, but Bartel, at least, gets a wordless moment of contrition. It's brief, and it's not much, and it's maybe a little subjective, but in coming just a minute after a piranha jumps out of the water to bite him on the face, it's also representative of the tone change Piranha takes in midstream.

Roger Corman's not famous for doling out paychecks to actors, but he surely had an extensive Rolodex, and Dante called up a number of his favorites: Barbara Steele, Kevin McCarthy (playing a doctor with a dire warning), and the aforementioned Bartel and Miller, both of whom had worked with Corman and Dante on Hollywood Boulevard two years earlier.

I don't know how Dante and company picked the cast, but a sizable chunk of it had been involved in man-vs-beastie flicks within the previous few years. Let's take a look:

Bradford Dillman: The Swarm, Bug
Heather Menzies: Sssssss
Keenan Wynn: Orca
Belinda Balaski: Food of the Gods, Locusts


Piranha was remade for cable in 1995, still under Corman's name. William Katt and Alexandra Paul took over the leads, with appearances from Monte Markham, James Karen, Soleil Moon Frye, and a young Mila Kunis.

The question facing the new remake: Are piranha still viable as monsters? Recent studies indicate that piranha school as a defensive behavior and not in order to hunt. Can an animal which is potentially deadly but unlikely to attack a human provide a convincing scare? I guess the makers of Bug sure thought so.