Every day I wake up, stagger the few yards from my bathroom, and slip on the pile of junk mail. Its sole purpose seems to be to kill me before I have a chance to claim my low rate credit card.

It was while slumped on the floor rubbing the back of my skull, contemplating the spot on the carpet that has bubbled up and discoloured surprisingly dramatically after I spilt paint thinner on it, that I decided that I should ignore any attempt at anything constructive and just watch a movie...

Unfortunately the film I chose to kill the time until my brain stopped aching was that most unholy of masterpieces... 

Piranha 2: Flying Killers, directed by the mighty James Cameron.

Cameron and I have something of a love hate relationship, true the man directed Aliens, assorted Terminator movies, and some other stuff of borderline merit...

Unfortunately he also took it upon himself to make my life yet more depressing.

He decided that I really needed to sit through the director's cut of The Abyss just to experience the true, extended, joy of Michael Beihn's (I refuse to care whether I have spelt his name correctly) glued-on moustache and repressed longing to oil Ed Harris' perfectly round head and slowly slip it up between his buttocks.

While it may be true that it wasn't the worst movie to have ever existed; it suffered heavily from the fact that I spent the entire time praying to a god I didn't believe in with the vague hope that the aliens would do something that even slightly interested me... er... like killing Michael Beihn and his moustache in fascinating and imaginatively watery ways...

Hell, I would have suspended my sense of disbelief quite happily if they could have killed him twice. Especially if one of those times was with a shark swimming up the alien's watery cock-tentacle and leaping on him.

Now it really goes downhill...

Being male, I still can't quite work out why I happened to be in a cinema at the same time as Titanic was on the screen... I am still ashamed to admit it... although I vaguely remember it being something to do with wanting to see Kate Winslet snap off the frozen fingers of Leonardo DiCaprio's corpse.

I used to spend every Friday parked up at the cinema watching whatever new release that lurched onto the screen that day. Perhaps a slow-growing tumour ate through the part of my brain that chose movies which wouldn't give me the urge to slam my head in the folding seats until my the sweet release of death. Whatever may have been the sordid truth I still ended inside the cinema quietly reading a book by the light of my keyring torch.

I did look up occasionally when I heard the ship starting to sink and people bouncing off things in a manner that brought out the same unfortunate uncontrollable laughter that also annoyed people when I was watching the plane crash in Alive and the scene in Independence Day when Bill Pullman's kid says "Is mommy sleeping now?" in quite possibly the most bitingly satirical way ever captured on celluloid.

It was Titanic that throttled my perverse childhood fondness for Cameron's work and gave me the strong urge to cryogenically freeze my eyeballs until he stopped making movies that could hurt them. Or perhaps just freeze them and smash them with a stone. However, it was the mighty Piranha 2 that, just for a flickering second, made me believe that the world could be a wonderful place again...

I found the movie for a quite exorbitant £2.99 at Makro, home of all things unsellable and the number one place for purchase of thousand packs of tampons for two pounds. Remembering both the Joe Dante original and spotting Cameron's name blazed across the box drew me in and I put back the giant bottle of sweet and sour sauce that I was going to spend the money on and picked up the video.

If my complete lack of research serves me well, Piranha 2 was Cameron's first movie and one that he did his best to have his name surgically removed from... While Lucas had his Holiday Special to haunt him, Cameron had a film that had a genetically modified piranha on the cover...

I shoved the cassette into the machine and, with great anticipation, listened to the grinding of gears and feeble whine of the motors as the lumbering beast started up... In some ways I came to wish it had chosen that time to die and not halfway through my copy of The Seven Samurai a few weeks later... yet in some ways I know that it was an experience that would change my life for the better...

I won't bore you with commenting on the quality of the camerawork, although admittedly it did seem like the film was shot using an improvised steady-cam created by the cinematographer clasping the camera between his buttocks.

I won't bore you with comments on the sound quality... let us just say that they used only the finest digital bean tins strung at either end of a length of Dolby shit-gorged tapeworm to record this baby...

All of these factors may effect the enjoyment of some, but not me... oh my god no... the thing that told me this was a movie of quality was the arrival of...

THE MIGHTY LANCE HENRIKSON...

Yes... he of the incredibly bony head and getting torn in half in Aliens fame... I had always assumed that Lance was born looking the wrong side of fifty and as menacing as an angered mongoose... The man looked like he was born to be caught standing over a steaming pile of whore offal in a Victorian alleyway.

Until I saw him in Piranha 2... which from now on I shall refer to as P2 because it's a pain to keep typing and it is also a truly lame Cameron pun...

Jesus... Lance was young-ish once... untalented, but young... In P2 he sports a form of prototype cragginess that doesn't quite work and makes him look as if he's left his head in the bath for too long, he also has about six more hairs than in much later movies.

I'll skip any initial plot for the chief reason that it was just like any other creature-feature of the period (which was somewhere in the 70's-80's but I can't be arsed to get up and pull the cassette from the bottom of the pile) and is littered with irritating teenagers in unnerving clothing.

These youngsters' flailings with the opposite gender were so staggeringly annoying that I seriously considered jabbing a fork into my temple... So fuck them... We all know why they are there. Much as pretty much every other two-dimensional cardboard cut-out in this movie they'll get eaten and, if they're female, to get their tops off a few minutes beforehand.

The tits will prove relatively unrewarding as we're in that awkward 70s-80s cross-over phase where they're all small and tidy. They will entirely disappear when the slut flops onto her back and sprawls like a female walrus welcoming a walrus double-vaginal. As I recall from hazy memories, the piranhas in Dante's original film specialized in first chewing off the bikinis of any females who were over the age of consent, and the same thing is true of Cameron's P2. This seems to be a film in which clothing is entirely optional for women.

I remember sitting and drunkenly watching this film with my brother and his (now ex-) fiancee and watching in fascination as, whenever nudity occurred, she gave him a filthy look until he put his hand over his eyes. It was, for him, one damn episodic movie. The poor fucker actually had to focus on the plot.

That is not to say that this is one erotic movie... oh god no... this is more like a cunningly subversive attempt to convert us all to Puritanism... If anyone is going to put nudity in a film could they please not follow it up with unconvincing paper mache piranhas eating the poor girl? I remember having a roughly similar experience when I absent-mindedly switched on Film Four in the middle of the morning and caught an unedited cut of Ai No Corrida (probably spelt that wrong as well... pedantry) although admittedly that didn't feature Piranhas.

The real meat of the film kicks in about an hour after you have stuck the cassette in the machine and about fifty-five minutes after you've begun considering what you should tape over it...

One minute you're watching some ungodly crap about Timmy, Billy, Bobby or whatever the hell the kid is called... I refuse to watch the film again to research such facts, and suddenly it becomes the greatest movie ever made... although only from a pretty dodgy perspective...

Suddenly up crops a piranha and it proceeds to merrily swoop on a nurse and eat her in the least convincing fashion I have seen outside of a dogfood commercial.

Note that I said "swoop"... In the wonderful world of sequels it seems that the baddie must return in a more advanced, more dangerous, yet lower-budget form, and P2 is no exception...

Now you'd think that you probably couldn't do much with the original's piranha... after all it's a fish, a small fish, admittedly a nasty one, but still a fish that would fit nicely in between two slices of bread and not overlap the Brevel...

 They could also be escaped by not putting your foot in the damn water, which is kinda a big weakness really and one that you would think would damn the piscine critters to obscurity... But no... they had possibly the greatest writers in Hollywood working on this movie. Such a flimsy obstacle would never stand in the way of making this the most terrifying Piranha yet...

So they made them fly.

I vaguely remember that it had something to do with genetically crossing a piranha and a flying fish to make some kind of ultimate military super warrior... Well, at least I think that's what it is unless the piranha and the flying fish went in for some perverse and dangerous inter-species fucking.

Quite why any military power would think it a masterstroke to drop fish on the enemy when a bomb would be less likely to provide them with a nice accompaniment to boiled potatoes and citrus butter (ask for recipe) is quite beyond me, but it seems like my kind of war...

So we are promptly treated to piranha flapping around and biting people in hotpants.

This was not quite what I had been expecting and it took a good hour to pry my jaw from the crisp and damp tissue-littered carpet.

By the time the film had ended I had lost any grip on reality, flayed the skin form my cock. and had begun babbling in tongues, my entire belief system shaken to the core.

I won't spoil the ending for any of those foolhardy enough to seek out a copy in their local neighbourhood skip, but all I'll say is that it features both digital watches and a strange buzzing noise that convinced me my tv was knackered.

To sum up

: I have watched this film twice in my life and honestly cannot bear to watch the thing again for the fear of its incredibly cheap cassette disintegrating into dust. The thought of this abysmal movie not sitting on my shelf taunting me every morning is one that brings a tear to my eye...

True, it stole a total of almost four hours from my life, but what was I going to do with them otherwise? I'd have only ended up wasting them on drink rather than immersing myself in the charismatic and, frankly, alluring world of P2: Flying Killers.

 If I am ever to be reincarnated I want it to be as a flying, genetically-modified, piranhas. who wouldn't? I would also be more picking on whose tops I chewed off... Really... If nature's given you wings and teeth, chew on something classier than the director's crackwhores in cameo roles.

UPDATE:

I no longer own either the tape or a VCR. The VCR died of old age. The tape got leant to someone who turned out to be a bit of a slapper. Not that I'm fucking bitter.

back to duck.