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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When it comes to dead bodies, The House of Seven Corpses plays home to 993 fewer than Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. This is an argument against the axiom of “less is more.”

In the first and only turn in the director’s chair from H.R. Pufnstuf writer Paul Harrison, the wonderful old manse of the title has remained in the Beal family for generations, despite so many members of the Beal family experiencing tragic death within its walls. The opening credits demonstrate how they came to leave this mortal coil by drowning, gunshot, hanging and other methods nefarious and felonious.

The premise isn’t very imaginative: When a crew comes to shoot a movie there about the Beals, and stays there instead of at a hotel, they befall the same fates as the family members did long ago. This comes after the discovery of such residential amenities as an on-site cemetery and secret passages, one of which leads to a room containing the Tibetian Book of the Dead and various volumes of witchcraft.

None of this comes as a surprise to Edgar Price (genre mainstay John Carradine), the grounds’ longtime caretaker and clan defender, nor should any of it come as a surprise to you. The House of Seven Corpses operates by the numbers, yet sometimes that’s okay. This is one of those cases: an average, harmless horror movie served up as comfort food. For such a promising title, it should hold more panache, more atmosphere, more thrills. That it doesn’t, however, hardly marks it for automatic write-off; the stay is pleasant enough. —Rod Lott

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Cruise ship Capt. Ashland (George Kennedy, The Naked Gun series) stands a mere three days from retirement, so you know what that means: There will be no woodworking and around-the-house puttering in his future. Not when there’s a Death Ship on the horizon!

Void of passengers but supposedly steered by ghosts, the rusty ship deliberately puts itself in harm’s way of Ashland’s party boat, ensuring a collision. The accident occurs via stock footage from at least two sources — one a third-rate Titanic TV-movie — that don’t come close to matching up with one another. The handful of survivors includes Ashland; his replacement, Marshall (Richard Crenna, Leviathan); Marshall’s wife and two kids, one of whom precociously possesses a small bladder; the band leader (Saul Rubinek, True Romance); an old lady; and a hot woman so someone can take a shower in blood later, after they all board the mysterious vessel.

See, as the title would have it, the Death Ship has a mind of its own, and has one thing on its mind: death, natch. It wastes no time in proceeding to knock off the cast members, because that’s what Nazis would do. (Oh, sorry — spoiler: The ship belonged to Nazis.)

Largely a television director, Alvin Rakoff (1979’s City on Fire) doesn’t bother with subtlety, hitting viewers on the head over and over with the Nazi angle. (We get it, Al!) When he lets up, he’s able to get some effective scenes out of his characters’ demise, particularly those that play upon the universal fears of drowning and seeing one’s face become covered in an ugly crust.

Having an old pro like Kennedy in command helps when the plot veers into turns the script makes no real effort to explain. Death Ship is a lot like Ghost Ship, the 2002 Dark Castle Entetainment picture that stole this film’s terrific poster art, but without the studio gloss — in other words, one of those cheap, haunted-house spookfests that works in spite of itself. —Rod Lott

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Having recently located her thriving mannequin-manufacturing biz to Lisbon, Betty (Lone Fleming, 1977’s It Happened at Nightmare Inn) reunites with Virginia (María Elena Arpón, The House That Screamed), her roomie from boarding school. Virginia’s square-jawed boyfriend, Roger (César Burner, Green Inferno), immediately suggests the three of them take a train trip to the countryside.

En route, Virginia gets jealous of a growing flirtation between her beau and her BFF, so she leaps off the choo-choo. Instead of walking the tracks back to the station like a normal person, however, she heads off perpendicular to them, through spacious fields to the ruins of Berzano, a medieval town now abandoned for good reason: Because up from its cemetery pop the ghosts of the Knights Templar, depicted here as skeletons in soot-covered hooded robes. (Where the risen knights keep their horses goes unaddressed.)

Yes, Virginia, there is a supernatural force of evil awakened! You’ve disturbed the Tombs of the Blind Dead! The first in writer/director Amando de Ossorio’s four-film series, the Spanish Tombs comes unearthed with a twist on the ol’ zombie conceit: On account of having their eyes pecked out by crows in the 13th century, these guys can’t see a lick; with a thirst for blood, they track their victims by sound, from dire screams to a quickened heartbeat.

Even though the Blind Dead move like semi-frozen molasses, they are terrifying characters. The way their bones pop through graves and shuffle through the maze-like ruins is a dirt-cheap effect, yet highly effective, encouraging viewer cries of “Run, bitch, run!” as they close in on their clueless prey. Other than an ugly rape scene, de Ossorio demonstrates keen instincts on what works, right down to an ending that proves more disturbing by letting your mind fill in its blanks. —Rod Lott

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On its surface, it may be easy to confuse Theatre of Blood for just another early ’70s British horror movie; a natural follow-up to star Vincent Price’s pair of Dr. Phibes films, in which an aggrieved maniac wreaks revenge on a group of people in a very specific and entertaining manner. But then as you watch, it quickly becomes clear that Theater plays by its own bizarre rules, making it an utterly unique, darkly comic horror classic.

Price stars as Edward Lionheart, a campy Shakespearian actor whose entire career has been ridiculed in print by London’s elitist circle of theatrical critics. When they deny him the annual acting trophy he’s convinced he deserves, he appears to commit suicide in front of them. But when they all start dying in murderous scenarios inspired by the plays of Lionheart’s beloved Bard, it’s clear that he’s not quite as deceased as he originally appeared.

You first know something is a bit off here when Diana Rigg (five years after TV’s The Avengers and looking amazing), playing Lionheart’s daughter, Edwina, first shows up in drag, complete with beard and enormous blond afro. Then there’s the film’s complete lack of a protagonist. Unable to bring themselves to make a critic a sympathetic hero, director Douglas Hickox and screenwriter Anthony Grenville-Bell instead allow Ian Hendry’s arrogant Peregrine Devlin to finally defeat Lionheart, but in such a way that makes the murderer seem more like a tragic hero than despicable villain.

But the real reason to watch Theatre of Blood is the opportunity to see Price sink his teeth into some of the best speeches Shakespeare ever wrote. Despite being given the excuse of playing an untalented “ham” actor, his performance leaves you wishing he had the opportunity to play those same roles in real life. Ultimately, this makes his character far more sympathetic than the assholes he slaughters throughout. —Allan Mott

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