When you go into a big summer movie there is a list of things that you expect to get in order for the experience to be a satisfying one. Whatever you’re watching needs to be big. If it’s an action plot, the stakes need to be huge. If it’s a romance, it needs to be set against the backdrop of something more picturesque than your typical, everyday setting. But more than anything, it needs to be fun. Now is not the time for heady, intellectual mumbo jumbo and experimental, artsy-fartsy nonsense. School is out for the love of Mike. I want something light hearted, funny, and full of adventure with charismatic characters who quip quotable lines. This summer has had almost none of that. Toy Story 3 was fun, but still a little too kiddy at it’s core to satiate my blockbuster hunger. Inception was full of spectacle, but still too naval gazing and talky to be truly escapist. Fact is, this summer has just been downright boring. A real downer. A snooze fest. Imagine my surprise then that the first real fun I’ve had in the theater in a long time comes from a B level exploitation horror. I usually hate this kind of stuff. It tries too hard to be camp and just ends up being crap. Happily, this isn’t the case for Piranha 3D, who doesn’t try to be anything other than awesome and consequently gives us is the first real good-time Charlie that’s hit the theaters since the weather has changed.
Piranha 3D is the third in a series of teen horror films that were originally created to cash in on the people getting eaten by fish craze of the early 80s. I haven’t seen the other entries in the series, but a little research tells me that the original was made by Joe “The Mother F’n Burbs” Dante and the sequel by a little known indie director named James Cameron. If they are made with even half of the sense of fun and flying in the face of good taste that this update is, then I’m sure they’re great and I hope to check them out soon. The premise of the film is simple enough, due to an earthquake opening up a chasm between a spring break hot spot and a subterranean lake, hundreds of scantily clad college aged kids end up running afoul of a horde of prehistoric, man-eating piranha. The only things standing between the kids and their grizzly demises are the local sheriff Julie Forester (Elizabeth Shue) and her teenage son Jake (Steven R. McQueen) who act as our de facto protagonists. Luckily for us, while good intentioned, the Forester’s don’t know much about piranha management, and a whole lot of people end up getting torn to shreds screaming. And usually they lose a layer of clothing before losing a layer of flesh. The results are buxom and bloody.
A handful of films over the last ten years or so have done what they can to garner an audience by being ridiculous. They market themselves as having pushed things too far. They’re bad, but in a deliberate, post modern way. It’s a joke, a goof, and the viewer is supposed to garner some sort of satisfaction at the feeling of being in on it. None of these films have done that much for me so far, but this one is finally able to get the formula just right. Piranha 3D takes what Snakes on a Plane tried to be and injects it with horse steroids. It takes the over the top action and ridiculousness of Planet Terror and replaces the winks and smirks with a glare and a middle finger. It replicates the self-assured embracing of B movie elements that Death Proof had, but cuts out all of the boring parts and the masturbatory dialogue. With Piranha 3D French director Alexandre Aja makes crafting an exploitation film look downright effortless. Which it seems like it should be. How these other large release films could get the process so wrong has been something of a befuddlement to me. I think the difference may just be the earnestness of Piranha 3D. The effects are poor, but not in a deliberately crafted way, in a real, we didn’t have much money to get this stuff done right way. The effect is more endearing and less smug. There is an abundance of over the top violence and gratuitous nudity, but they’re not inserted into the film ironically, they’re there to inspire legitimate joy in the audience.
Shue and McQueen aren’t bad in their roles, but they’re not really given much to do despite being the main characters. Here the lead roles aren’t memorable; they’re less characters and more archetypes. They exist to push the plot forward and get us to the next big sequence more than they do to be developed or relatable. Where the acting really shines in this film, however, is with the supporting cast. While the Foresters travel along their terror filled paths they come across a smorgasbord of delightful and eccentric weirdos. The opening scene of the film starts things off right with homage to Jaws. We open on Richard Dreyfuss in a little fishing boat, dressed curiously like his character from Spielberg’s modern classic and singing a few familiar bars of ‘Show Me The Way To Go Home’. Serving as our establishing kill, Dreyfuss doesn’t stick around long, but he’s visibly game for the visual joke/tribute and he really sets the tone for what’s to come. Joining Dreyfuss in a throwback role is Sir Christopher Lloyd who shows up playing a wild-eyed biologist that feels very unmistakably like Doctor Emmett Brown jacked up on speed. He dives into the role with the enthusiasm of a man who has just been given a new lease on life, and while he doesn’t get much screen time to work with, every second that he’s chewing scenery is simply joyful. Ving Rhames shows up getting cast as pretty much Ving Rhames and was able to make me laugh in an over the top and completely unnecessary last stand against the attacking piranha. When he rips an engine off of a boat with his bare hands and uses it as a weapon you know that it’s on. And maybe my favorite performance in the film is Jerry O’Connell playing an on-screen version of the douchey guy who became a millionaire founding Girls Gone Wild. Normally the inclusion of O’Connell in a film’s cast tastes to me like comedic poison, but this role manages to channel his dopey, grinning, pie-faced persona into a role that he is perfect for. Wearing a Speedo, blowing coke, and shamelessly exploiting women, O’Connell’s character is a real cad, and he plays it all with greasy relish, swinging for the fences and milking the maximum amount of loathing out of the audience that he can before he is very cathartically disposed of. This and his legendary role as Trip McNeely in Can’t Hardly Wait will undoubtedly go down as the definitive moments of his career.
But more important than having any sort of correct philosophy or containing any sort of lauded performance, Piranha 3D succeeds because it’s just full of awesome shit. It takes the current studio created 3D craze and completely exploits it and mocks it in the most delightfully nihilistic way possible. Puke spews toward the camera. A mangled penis floats toward your face. Three-dimensional boobs repeatedly dip into the lake’s surface, just inches from your grasp. And we’re talking big, jiggly, natural ones too. Real B movie throwbacks whose ease of movement the 3D effects embrace in a case of true cinematic synergy. The big, show stopping sequence where the piranha attack the largest spring break gathering on the lake must go on for twenty minutes and may be the most bloody, delightful, ridiculous scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s the sinking of James Cameron’s Titanic with gore and boobs. If you can exit that scene without having a gigantic smile on your face then I imagine that you’re probably dead inside. You should go to a doctor and get that checked out. And if that isn’t enough to draw you in, then let me add that the nude, underwater, lesbian ballet sequence was simply inspired.
Piranha 3-D
