Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1982)

Down in Jamaica, Club Elysium hosts an assortment of “characters,” all soaking up the sun and getting into mischief while waiting for the annual Grunion fish fry.  Scuba instructor Ann Kimbrough (Tricia O’Neil) loses one of her students to and becomes entangled in a fight against unnatural, flying piranha.  Her husband (Divorced?  Separated?) Steve (Lance Henriksen) is the local police chief who divides his time between investigating the recent rash of grisly deaths and harassing various residents and visitors.  Their son Chris (Ricky Paull Goldin) is a horny teen (I’m of the thinking that the unhorny variety is as rare as hen’s teeth).  And that’s pretty much all you need to know.

Producer/uncredited co-director/co-writer (under the guise of H. A. Milton, along with credited director James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee) Ovidio G. Assonitis had a penchant for ripoffs (and some more original, unique fare; The Visitor, anyone?) that were cheesy as all hell but still had a certain air of legitimacy, because they included genuinely talented Hollywood luminaries onscreen who seemed to have no problems delivering some genuinely godawful dialogue.  Folks like Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, and John Huston would saunter into an Assonitis film, seem to stick around for slightly longer than they actually do (courtesy of some relatively slick editing and pacing), and saunter back out.  In an interview (if I recall, it was in an issue of Fangoria), Assonitis was asked how he got such great actors to appear in his less than auspicious efforts.  The Greek maverick’s response was as honest and forthright (but most importantly, simple) as any of the unabashedly imitative celluloid he produced: “I paid them.”  

Naturally, since he couldn’t afford someone like Fonda for an entire shoot to take on the protagonist role (and the advanced age of some of these actors would have been a little prohibitive considering the physical requirements), that responsibility would fall to younger folks like Henriksen, Bo Hopkins, et al.  What’s interesting in Piranha Part Two is that Henriksen really isn’t the star of the show, as one might expect from his Chief-Brody-esque character.  Ann is the main character here, and she’s actually a fairly strong female protagonist, which I credit to Cameron’s contributions to the screenplay (the man does self-assured, headstrong women better than most).  She’s single-ish, raising and supporting Chris by herself (yeah, Steve makes time for his son, but it’s mostly just checking in with him and being proud that he might be getting laid by the aloofly coquettish Alison [Leslie Graves]).  Ann’s job is one of some authority, requiring both technical knowledge and solid instincts.  Ann propels the plot forward; when she states to Steve that there’s something fishy going on (sorry), he doesn’t believe her, causing her to seek out answers for herself.  She isn’t defined by the men in her life, but she’s still a sexual being, and she sleeps with whom she chooses.  In a genre mostly ruled by Everyman heroes (think: Doug McClure in films like Humanoids from the Deep, and I’m pro Doug McClure), it’s rather refreshing at this point in cinema history to have an Everywoman capable of defeating the Big Bad who isn’t just a Final Girl.

Much like in the first Piranha, the idea of evolution is at play.  In that one, the killer fish were engineered to withstand the cold waters of the rivers of Vietnam.  Here, they’re engineered to fly.  Why?  Because flying piranha.  Though said evolution is man-made like something the Marvel Comics’ character The High Evolutionary might do, it’s still purpose progression (and piranha that can fly certainly have that many more options for dinner).  This notion of evolution branches off into the realm of mating, being (as far as this non-scientist writer knows) the actual course that evolution takes.  There’s the Grunion spawning at the resort, wherein the female tastily-named fish flop themselves up onto the beach to lay their eggs and become inseminated by the males.  Meanwhile, we have such human characters in pursuit of sex as Beverly, the ditzy, soon-to-be-corn-rowed bimbo who desperately flings herself at dorky Leo as soon as she hears that he’s a doctor (those survival instincts kicking in).  Mal, the stuttering chef at the club, gets hoodwinked into feeding co-floozies Loretta and Jai based on the promise of a strenuous ménage à trois.  Ann beds down with scuba student (and possibly more?) Tyler (Steve Marachuk), and Chris, of course, gets a bit of trim from Alison.  Then there is the nameless, faceless couple who get interrupted just prior to bumping uglies as the film opens.  You can argue that the sex in this film has nothing to do with mating or advancing and propagating the species, that in Piranha Part Two, it’s all principally for pleasure (both the audience’s and the characters’), and you would be correct, but like Sinatra crooned, you can’t have one without the other, and this is where it starts.

What’s perhaps most intriguing about this film is that it succeeds despite its one-dimensionality.  Aside from Ann, none of the characters are all that compelling.  The people in films like this are typically set up to be fodder, and that rule remains in effect here.  Cameron and company give us no reason to feel anything when any of them bites it (or gets bitten by it, take your pick).  Where Joe Dante’s original film gave us satirical caricatures, Piranha Part Two simply gives us cartoons, but it still wants us to care about their fates.  The rich boat “captain” that Chris works for is a gormless snob.  Chris and Alison are just hot young hormones on parade (fair enough on that one).  Jai and Loretta are cruel, duplicitous opportunists.  Beverly and Leo are spastic geek.  The hotel manager (in the coveted Larry Vaughn role) is just venal enough to be a dick but not enough to stress what the annual fish fry really, really means for his business.  Gabby (Ancile Gloudon) and his son are local fishermen who ply their trade with dynamite (we know they’re okay, because Steve lets them off for, what I would take to be, a rather serious safety violation).  We get a couple scenes where they show up, but aside from being what I assume is the sole source of dynamite within a twenty-mile radius, they mean nothing to the story despite the death of one of them, which is intended to be solemn and carry some emotional weight (it doesn’t).  Which brings us to Steve, who should have some kind of development in regards to his relationship with his family.  Yet, all Steve does in the story is be somewhat of a condescending asshole to Ann and pat Chris on the head.  Yes, he takes part in the big climax, but honestly, for all that came before with his character, it could have been any one of the others doing what he does.  Nevertheless, Piranha Part Two still manages to be enjoyable up to a point, regardless of its vacuity, partly because it’s well paced, partly because it’s just cockamamie enough for a lark, and partly because it does have Ann as the one shining point around which the rest of it congeals.  It’s not a standout of the Horror/Animals Amok genre/subgenre, but it fits the bill as a harmless diversion.

MVT:  Ann is smart, and sexy, and adept, and O’Neil’s performance sells what could have been rather foolish in the wrong hands.

Make or Break:  The finale is nicely edited, intercutting multiple events and building tension competently.  An abrupt ending undercuts it slightly, but not enough to totally ruin it.

Score:  6.75/10 

Beyond the Door 3 (1989)

I’ve never ridden on a train for any extended length of time.  I have ridden on public transit trains to get around cities like Philadelphia and Chicago on occasion, but I have never ridden the rails outside a radius of a few miles.  I’ve been tempted to, especially since it satisfies my two travel criteria of being one, a means of transport for which my involvement in reaching a destination is minimal, and two, not an airplane.  However, the cost would have been much higher than gas consumption and upkeep on my car.  Worse, it would take more than a day to get where I was going, which is just a bit longer than I want to spend on a train (barring a “train cruise” or something, naturally).  Of course, Europe has America beat to shit in regards to locomotives.  If movies are any indication (solid reasoning, that), not only are train rides on that continent popular and affordable for all income levels, but they’re also filled to brimming with hot coeds looking to party (they could also be stuffy, British professor types looking to research) and maniacs/perverts/monsters looking to violate or kill said revelers.  If you get bored staring out the window at the lush scenery whipping by, you can always take in an eyeful of the bodily fluids in which each car is assumedly awash and/or encrusted at any given moment.  And if you’re one of the characters in Jeff Kwitney’s Beyond the Door 3 (aka Amok Train aka Evil Train aka Winds of Evil aka Il Treno), you can also get ensconced in a plot for which the phrase “hot mess” not only applies but also doesn’t even cover the half of it.

While blind fortune teller Vesna (Olga Poznatov) maps out a young woman’s life via very specific, non-standardized Tarot-esque (but more like newspaper clippings) cards on a Tic Tac Toe board, a gaggle of cultists gathers and holds candles.  Cut to modern day Los Angeles, where a teeny weeny Balkan Studies class (I didn’t even know such courses could be taken when I was in college, so just goes to show you) is shipping off to (I think) Serbia in order to witness a centuries old ritual (which could totally not have been recreated in Los Angeles, I’m sure).  Under the chaperoning of the unctuously straitlaced Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), the kids are quickly under siege by the aforementioned cultists and forced to hop a train which is filled (again, to brimming) with Evil and has its sights set on the perennially bug-eyed, ultra-tense Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert) as its object of desire.      

I’m not going to pretend that I comprehend the full spectrum of belief paths encompassed by the concept of paganism, but my perception is that it’s usually both polytheistic and nature-oriented (once more citing cinema as either educator or deceiver).  In films like this one, however, it strictly refers to Satanism.  In fact, I cannot recall a single film that has ever depicted pagans as anything other than either maleficent or humorously airheaded.  The students are supposed to attend what Andromolek refers to as a “passion play” centering on a virgin female.  We know that there is evil afoot, but rather than giving us some twisted play on a bloody-minded love goddess or something along the lines of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, we just get a Christian God versus Christian Devil conflict.  Like their portrayals of paganism, Horror films also love the notion that nature itself is filled with nightmares and malice for human beings to endure.  Just witness any of the Friday the 13^th films, Long Weekend, Grizzly, Frogs, ad infinitum for further evidence.  You go out into the woods, be prepared to wind up dead, and this film does fulfill expectations in this regard.  With that in mind, the portrayal of the Satanists is not necessarily what we would fully anticipate.  The village the kids are taken to is literally in the middle of nowhere and immediately offputting.  It is filled with stick and straw huts and has mud paths for roads.  The villagers are all old, pallid, and sneering.  They treat the students like the cattle they are.  This earthy connection is incongruous with what we normally envision about Satanists, though it does satisfy the requirement of thinly (very thinly) veiled enmity.  Movie Satanists are typically suave, affluent, higher class or at the very least, they are wielders of some type of power in a community.  They’re usually not poor, filthy peasants.  I suppose this is a nitpick, and it can be said that it doesn’t matter which deity these folks worship, but it’s one of those aspects of Beyond the Door 3 that stuck out to me, this inconsistency with the classic approach, but also bear in mind that I’m going forward with the idea that paganism and Satanism are not necessarily mutually exclusive.   

Ideas of destiny and fate are predominant throughout the film.  The credit sequence maps out the path of Beverly’s life.  Beverly is marked with a rather peculiar birthmark (a red, stylized Devil’s head shape spanning from below her navel to beneath her breasts) indicating she is the chosen one for Andromolek and company’s plans.  Everything pushes her toward a perceived end, and it’s in this respect that we can allow for the fact that Beverly is a truly unlikable character (and at least it’s also one of the very few things in the film that actually pays off somewhat satisfactorily).  She grimaces in a peculiarly slack-jawed fashion at everyone in the film (this is excused with throwaway lines about how all of her friends and classmates torment and tease her for being a virgin, though this really isn’t represented on screen).  She reacts in disgust to her mother, even while professing her tepid love for the woman.  She is a person in need of a father figure (her dad being deceased), and at first it’s implied that Andromolek will fill this position.  He pays special attention to her, and after she is mildly taunted during a meal, he comforts her.  And that’s about as far as this facet is carried (although, I suppose there could also be some creepy, psychosexual/incest underpinnings happening as well).  Outside of these couple things, Beverly is essentially a nigh-blank slate and not in a good way.  As a result, I honestly couldn’t be bothered to care about a single thing that happened to her (I said we could allow for her unlikability, not discount it completely in this film).  This engenderment of apathy, compounded by the film’s incoherent insanity (the ending is simultaneously “what the fuck?” and “who gives a fuck?”) and somnambulistic pacing, makes Beyond the Door 3 a chore with very little reward waiting when it finally pulls into the station.   

MVT:  The kills in the film are all relatively inventive, very gory, and mostly enjoyable, if that’s your thing (and it is mine, to some degree).  And that’s the long and the short of the good things in this movie.

Make or Break:  The break is, of all things, Beverly’s shower scene.  Yes, it gives us the only naked flesh in the film as well as a glimpse at Bev’s birthmark.  But it also gives us the first indication of Beverly’s full-blown, harpy-esque characterization.  It’s said that the lowest you can go is rock bottom.  I would disagree.  You can always dig down further, if you use the right tools.  Mary Kohnert is the right tools.

Score:  4.5/10

The Visitor (1978)

"This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The producers' purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine." Thus plays the introduction to what I feel is one of the most interesting, outlandish, and downright creepy programs ever broadcast. I'm speaking, of course, about "In Search Of," hosted by Leonard Nimoy and running from the late 1970s into the early 80s. Each show would focus on a particular mysterious subject (the real Sherlock Holmes, etcetera) and posit some of the most insane hypotheses conceivable (the real Sherlock Holmes, etcetera). Whether there was much actual research done or the writers simply smoked a whole lot of something, the show was entertaining, and the recreations they shot on grainy 16mm film used to freak me out as a child. But the bizarre and the unexplained is what people wanted to see, and the quality of films, television programs, books, magazines, etcetera on the subject vacillated from the good, to the bad, to the indifferent. So you just know that the Italians would get involved somehow, some way.

Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is a precocious young girl who strolls around like her crap don't stink, makes things explode, and makes vague threats to her mother, Barbara (Joanne Nail). See, Katy wants mom to marry beau, Ray (Lance Henriksen), and give her a brother (presumably to mate with). You might think that's a bit taboo, but it's really okay, because Katy is possessed by the spirit of Sateen (not to be confused with the fabric of the same name), an evil alien mutant who mated with Earth women to pass on his spirit before being destroyed by a flock of birds trained by his archenemy, the eponymous Visitor (John Huston). The forces of good and evil eventually collide (sort of) over the fate of Barbara's womb and Katy's soul.

Giulio Paradisi's The Visitor (aka Stridulum) is about as New Age and paranormal as a film can get. It presents itself as a science fiction/mystical film, but it is actually a demon possession movie couched in science fiction/mystical tropes. The forces of good and evil herein are not named outright, but they both come from other planets and possess extraordinary powers (sometimes aided by an onscreen adjustable wrench). The good guys wear white (mostly), the bad guys wear black (mostly). But the most important aspect on either side is that they are preoccupied with the concepts of good and evil and the cosmic balance that hangs between the two. The bad guys want to destroy, the good guys want to save (and more specifically want to save a soul). They are, for all intents and purposes, angels and demons. However, religion is never spoken of overtly in the film. Instead, characters are concerned with astrology, stellar light shows, and trucks lit up like the craft in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Sateen is not Satan (or Pazuzu) but a malefic extraterrestrial bent on annihilation. His spirit just happens to inhabit the body of a young girl (sound familiar?).

The concept of evil as something which can be passed on or inherited has been around for years. Fritz Lang's The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse is based on this idea. Eric Red's Body Parts also relies on this notion, though there it is the result of receiving an actual piece of an evil person. The list goes on and on. Here, Katy received Sateen's spirit in her mother's womb. Like The Bad Seed's Rhoda Penmark, who is bad because her ancestor was a killer who started young and passed on the genes, Katy's knack for misbehavior was forced upon her, as well. With that said, Katy is one of the most obnoxious, slap-worthy characters you will ever see, and you will feel a thrill when Shelley Winters does what you have been dying to do for over an hour.

Katy's misanthropy plays into many adults' pedophobia. Does this fear come from children's' ability to embarrass us due to their lack of social filters? Is it because they haven't yet developed a moral compass (and often don't seem capable of doing so or concerned with its absence)? Is it because they will replace us in time, and we adults want to maintain power for as long as possible (not to mention that this usurpation has been told of in violent terms in myths like those of Electra and Oedipus)? Of course, when a child like Katy actually makes threats and throws things, wounds, and all but kills the parent, there can be little doubt that the maternal power structure is in heated contention. Is it any wonder then that Barbara is completely uninterested in spawning any more progeny?

Since this is an Italian-produced film (courtesy of Ovidio G. Assonitis), you can bank on (and you shall receive) a dearth of logic and enough plot holes to fill the Lincoln Tunnel. Chief among them, and the thing that nagged me worst of all throughout was that no one at all ever does anything about the things Katy gets up to in public. She lays waste to a group of teenage boys at an ice rink, actually sending one flailing through a restaurant window and cracking the skulls of the rest against the rink wall. She habitually knocks out her babysitters so she can play "Pong" in peace. At her birthday party, an "accident" occurs that winds up in disaster. Granted, Glenn Ford makes his brief appearance as a cop investigating the little malcontent, but nothing comes of this, either. You're just waiting for someone to finally wise up and directly step in to take action. That's why Katy's tête-à-tête with Phillips (Winters) is so gratifying, if fleeting.3

The special effects are passable and not much more. There are a lot of composite/matte shots utilizing cloud tank effects for roiling clouds. They do what they need to do, but it seems to me the elements were all lit differently (most discernibly in the shots of Huston, which never appear to be lit from the correct direction), thus undercutting a full suspension of disbelief. The finale contains some of the funniest animal effects you may ever witness. The film is shot well enough (and there are even some very nice compositions here and there) for the most part. However, action scenes are blocked and edited confusingly, and while you'll get the overall thrust of the scene, you'll be hard pressed to actually describe what you saw. 

The writing (credited in part to Assonitis and Paradisi) is confused and ultimately confusing, with the writers throwing just about everything they could at the screen and then hoping that some moderately thoughtful visuals would be enough to pacify the audience. Thus, the film starts off intriguingly and ends up a mess, buried under the weight of its ambitions (though I hesitate to use that word, because it feels more like simply a desire to shoehorn as much as the filmmakers could into a feature film). Nonetheless, the cast is loaded with talent and, frankly, better than the material deserves. I recall an interviewer asking Assonitis how he got such monumental actors in his cheap genre movies. He said he paid them. At one point, the Visitor tells Barbara that her confusion has been transmitted to her "from another time, another place." That's kind of how I look at my DVD of The Visitor.

MVT: The cast is stellar, and they really give it their all. It's a shame they couldn't appear in something a little more coherent and worthwhile.

Make or Break: The birthday scene, while being characteristically baffling in its presentation, does have a nice twist that I genuinely did not see coming.

Score: 6/10