Perhaps James Cameron shouldn’t be so quick to disown Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, his directorial debut, because with the exception of all things technical, it’s better than Avatar. Oh, it’s super-cheesy, all right, but so was Avatar with its blue cat-people and their sex tails and Leona Lewis ballads.

Related only in name to the Roger Corman-produced, Joe Dante-directed Piranha of three years prior, this Italian-financed, Jamaican-shot sequel takes place at the Caribbean island resort Club Elysium. Former marine biologist Anne Kimbrough (Tricia O’Neil, The Gumball Rally) lives and works there as a diving instructor, taking hotel guests down into the deep blue sea. Making her job difficult, if not endangered, is the sudden appearance of the title’s school of killer fish.

Its mistakes number into the double digits, but where Piranha Part Two errs primarily is in failing to include what made the original flick work: self-parody, not to mention humor in general. As if to compensate, Cameron’s sequel takes a page from innovations in feminine hygiene products and fits his fish with wings. This mutant breed of piranha flies. While in flight, they tweet like canaries. This makes the attack scenes sillier than usual, whether the toothy swimmers are making lunch meat out of a morgue nurse, two sailing Penthouse Pets or any of the guests engaged in some stupid beach ritual that requires them to carry torches as they walk toward the shoreline and chant, “We want fish! We want fish! We want fish!”

They get fish. In the face.

Practically matching the kills scene for scene are instances of T&A, beginning with the scuba-sex prologue. Nudity is fairly rare in Cameron’s world, and never this gratuitous, but even if Lance Henriksen weren’t onboard playing a boat-driving police chief, you can draw a direct line from several Piranha Part Two shots to Cameron’s The Abyss, Titanic and Aliens. —Rod Lott

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