The film opens at night, off the coast of an island in Jamaica. A young couple are scuba diving in an old ship wreck, the Dwight Fitzgerald. They start to explore the wreck, all of a sudden they take their scuba gear and swim wear off and start to have sex, at this point I found myself asking how they intend to breathe., before I could think of a reasonable answer they are both attacked and eaten by a shoal of vicious genetically engineered flying piranhas! Wow, a pretty good start, we've already seen underwater sex, nudity, killer flying piranha that make a silly noise, and a couple of deaths and we're less than ten minutes into the film. Unfortunately the film can't maintain this pace or level of incident, as for the next thirty or so minutes after the opening credits, we are subjected to constant unnecessary character development that doesn't really develop the characters much at all. We are introduced to our main characters including, Anne Kimbrough (Tricia O'Neil) a scuba diving instructor and tour guide, her ex husband Steve Kimbrough (the always reliable Lance Henriksen) who appears to be the local law enforcement officer and their son Chris (Ricky G. Paull). We are also introduced to all the fish food. Basically the guests of a beach side resort. These scenes drag and get dull very quickly. At about the thirty minute mark Anne takes her scuba diving class to explore the ship wreck. One of the group wanders off on his own, Anne swims around looking for him, when she does find him he's been half eaten. After some detective work like studying the wounds and another dive to the ship wreck she discovers the flying piranhas, but is it already too late? Will she be able to convince the local authorities and the owners of the beach resort of the threat before everyone ends up as piranha fish food? This was the directorial debut of the soon to be famous James Cameron, even though I don't think he brags it too often. Apparently executive producer Ovidio G. Assonitis was unhappy with Cameron's work and added scenes and re-cut the film before release. I would love to know the truth behind these stories and to watch Cameron's original cut, considering the films he's made since it's a safe bet it would have been better than what eventually ended up on cinema/TV screens. Anyway, I quite liked it for what it is, it's professionally enough made. Some of the flying piranha effects look a little dated and silly, but everything considered I thought they looked OK-ish. The special make up effects work better with some nice mangled corpses, severed chewed up heads and various bites, I just wish there was more of them. The film fails to build up much excitement or tension until the final twenty minutes or so when Anne and Tyler Sherman (Steve Marachuk) a biochemist who helped create the piranhas, plant bombs in the wreck and are trapped by the returning piranha and must find a way out or either be eaten or blown up. A bit too little, too late. The version I watched must have been uncut as it contains all the scenes the 'alternate versions' section on the IMDb, there is some nudity there, and some reasonable gore. Apart from the painfully slow opening thirty or so minutes after the opening credits I quite liked it, in spite of it's faults. Worth a watch at least.
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