James Cameron's ignominious directorial debut PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING flies onto Blu-ray courtesy of 88 Films.

As Club Elysium prepares for its annual grunion fish fry, diving instructor Anne (Tricia O'Neil, TED & VENUS) discovers the half-eaten corpse of one of her students in the wreckage of a sunken ship. Despite her insistence that whatever killed him could not have been any known species, her estranged sheriff husband Steve (Lance Henriksen, ALIENS) is unwilling to listen to her when a similar corpse is found on land. With the help of smitten hotel guest Tyler (Steve Marachuk, HOT TARGET), Anne continues her investigation and lights upon the first film's massacre by government-engineered piranha designed to disrupt the food supply of Vietnam rivers during the war. As the corpses pile up, Anne's warnings fall on deaf ears as resort owner Raoul (Ted Richert, EYES OF A STRANGER) is more worried about tourist dollars than human lives. When they discover that this particular strain of mutant piranha can fly, Anne and Tyler gear up for an attack while her ex-husband searches for their son Chris (Ricky Paull Goldin, LAMBADA) who has stolen away in a dinghy with the teenage daughter (Leslie Graves, DEATH WISH II) of a yachting client.

Not content to rip-off JAWS with TENTACLES, enterprising producer Ovidio G. Assonitis – who had a success with the EXORCIST spin-off BEYOND THE DOOR – follows up Joe Dante's Roger Corman-produced PIRANHA with none of that film's quirky humor and sending up of genre conventions. An American production with Assonitis using an Italian crew behind the camera, PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING plays very much like an Italian rip-off (most notably like Sergio Martino's earlier THE GREAT ALLIGATOR) with leads Henriksen, O'Neil, and Marachuk backed by largely non-committal performances of supporting players post-dubbed seemingly more out of convenience more so than acting ability or language barriers. While first time director James Cameron – who had worked as an art director on a number of Roger Corman New World productions – was fired from the production, it was perhaps for the best as THE TERMINATOR was not only a better "debut" but PIRANHA II's direction feels pretty anonymous and Assonitis not only shot some additional footage during the production but also supervised the editing. The make-up effects were the work of Maurizio Trani (ZOMBI HOLOCAUST) and the effects were supervised by Giannetto de Rossi (ZOMBIE), but the gore is often underlit as photographed by Assonitis' regular DP Roberto D'Ettore de Piazzoli (MADHOUSE), and the mechanical piranha flying scenes and attacks are not all that impressive. The film's greatest asset is the scoring of Stelvio Cipriani (BARON BLOOD) credited to "Steven Powder."

Released theatrically by Columbia Pictures and on VHS by Embassy Home Entertainment, PIRANHA II's production troublesome history became more apparent when the film arrived on DVD from Sony. The transfer was cropped to fullscreen but ran roughly ten minutes longer than the U.S. version, representing Assonitis' preferred cut of the film. The first noticeable difference is the pre-credits sequence in which the two divers are seen on their boat before diving and being killed. The entire sequence occurs before the titles sequence on the international version which carries the title PIRANHA II: FLYING KILLERS whereas the American version starts with the credits – with the title PIRANHA PART TWO: THE SPAWNING – and features the couple already under the water while nudity has been trimmed. The film had its Blu-ray debut stateside courtesy of Scream Factory with a new 2K scan of the longer producer's cut, and it appears the same master has been used by 88 Films for their Region B edition. The night scenes are still dark but the1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer is easily the best the film has looked on home video. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track highlights the score but also makes apparent the disparity between the live dialogue recording and the post-dubbing with the voice casting peopled by several familiar voices from English dubs of Italian genre productions. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.