Piranha 3D Review

This weekend, I made an hour drive to my buddy's place and ended up seeing Piranha 3D for free thanks to a couple of free Fandango passes.  Was it all worth it?  Of course it was!  But I would've willingly paid full price and driven further (OK, maybe not, as I loathe driving) to see it.  Why?  Well read on, true believer!

In short, Piranha 3D is modernized exploitation at it's finest.  And you know me and my affinity for any genre of film that ends with "-sploitation" so obviously I was going to love it.  Honestly, you could watch this back-to-back with Machete (another movie I'm super-pumped for) and you'd instantly have Grindhouse 2010.  I'm not lying when I say this movie is almost nothing but boobs and gore in 3D, which gives it a great late '70s-early '80s feel to the whole thing, but with the modern sheen of 3D, which makes all the positive reviews from mainstream critics all the more confusing.  That's not to say Piranha 3D is perfect, but it's charm makes up for any flaws there may be.

Case in point, there came a point in Piranha where the plot came to a screeching halt to devote a good few minutes to a couple of fake-boobed strippers doing a slow-motion swimming routine in 3D.  But instead of thinking how demeaning and exploitative this could be taken as, all I could think was "This is what technology has come to.  All hail Science!"  Seriously, we have 3D boobs galore (to the point where they're just jiggling in front of the camera for no reason, 3D vomit (which I'm sure the Jackass crew is super-pissed having been beaten to the punch) and 3D Ving Rhames wielding a boat propeller (which gave me instant flashbacks to Zombie Holocaust aka Dr. Butcher M.D.)  While Piranha 3D may not be the best movie of the year by any standard, it definitely takes the cake for Most Gratuitous; a fake award I made up in my mind that The Expendables should have won hands down.  While there may be lulls in the plot and the gore set pieces, Piranha 3D pads it out with plenty of naked women and beautifully filmed vistas.  Sure, the latter part may seem out of place but considering Alexandre Aja's previous work like High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake, it really comes as no surprise.  This is one damn fine looking movie...and I'm not even talking about the boobs for once.

As for the 3D, I can't really judge considering Piranha 3D is actually the first 3D movie I've seen since the days of red and blue tinted glasses.  I'm not joking.  The last 3D movie I saw in theaters was Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.  Therefore, I have no previous subject to compare Piranha to.  Although, I will admit I wasn't exactly looking forward to the 3D effects once I saw the 3D trailers before the movie.  First off was the trailer for the next Resident Evil movie.  On a side note, they're STILL making these movies?!?  They're seriously almost as whored out as the Saw franchise by this point, only somehow even LESS interesting.  The 3D effects were decent but instead of things looking like they were coming out at you, it looked like the background was moving further back instead.  When it came to the trailer for Tron: Legacy (yet another movie this year I'm psyched for), the 3D effects were almost non-existent, which made me sad as hell.  But once Piranha 3D started, I felt a bit better, even if the opening sequence did look a bit hokey with some really obvious CGI effects.  Piranha definitely played the 3D aspect to the hilt, going to some of the obvious "Insert Object Into The Camera" bits, but that adds to the overall charm of the movie.  I'd have to say the best use of the 3D wasn't the boobs or the vomit but either when Ving Rhames used the boat propeller or when they did the "Hitchcock zoom" or whatever you want to call it.  You know what I mean, the zoom effect where the actor gets closer in the foreground but the background moves further back.  Bet you'd never see that in a 3D movie, let alone Piranha 3D.  I'd like to imagine the effects came off a lot better than the likes of Clash of the Titans, Alice In Wonderland and The Last Airbender considering those movies weren't actually filmed in 3D while Piranha was, but I'd have no way of knowing without watching those movies...which I don't want to do.

But back to the movie itself, it pretty much works on all levels, even if the most obvious levels are "Boobs" and "Gore".  Really, any self-respecting horror fan or gorehound like myself should really see this just for the so-called "Wet T-Shirt Massacre" at about the half-way point of the movie, where a bunch of nubile and studly co-eds are devoured for a good 20 minutes or so.  Piranha really has some of the most disgusting and most effective gore effects I've seen of the recent era of horror films, as it should considering they used about more fake blood than any other movie in history.  But beyond all that, the plot itself works and the acting is solid.  Jerry O'Connell takes the cake as the douchebag cokehead proprietor of Wild Wild Girls (totally not Girls Gone Wild) and his screams of agony when he gets what's coming to him made me think he went to the Sir Nicolas Cage School of Acting for this one.  Elizabeth Shue does a great job as the heroine of the film, and looks mighty fine for her age to boot.  In fact, she's about the only woman in the movie that keeps her top on...which is a bit of a shame considering she got herself into great fighting shape and makes her role as the tough Sheriff all the more believable.  Adam Scott provides the comic relief when the sight and gore gags don't, but I wish he could've gotten more screen time.  Speaking of more screen time, Ving Rhames doesn't do a whole lot as Shue's deputy but when he does something, you'll know it.  And Christopher Lloyd really only shows up as a glorified cameo but his performance will definitely give you flashbacks to the Back To The Future movies.  Honestly, the only characters I didn't really like were Elizabeth Shue's character's teenage son and his love interest, moreso his love interest.  I'll chalk that up to the general annoyance of teenagers, in which case they definitely succeeded, but the girl wasn't that great.  Sure, she was cute and all but having joined the Wild Wild Girls crew just to spite him only proves to me how vindictive girls can be.  Worse yet, when she was stuck at the bottom of a sinking boat filled with ravenous piranha, at first she was just like "Ugh, like can you just get me out already?  Gawd!"  Sure, she got scared later on but she should've been scared the entire time.  But here I go again, nitpicking the acting in the kind of movie where acting doesn't really matter.

One last aspect before I wrap this up is the soundtrack.  It's so out of place if you really think about it, but works if you don't think...which you shouldn't be.  Since the movie takes place during Spring Break, almost all of the music comes from the likes of LMFAO and other 3OH!3 sound-alike hip-hop/techno groups.  Honestly, I liked it and kinda want to get the soundtrack just to cruise around in my car to.  And if someone asks me what I'm listening to, I'll just go "The Piranha 3D soundtrack?  Yeah, you know that movie where everyone gets eaten by fish?  Yup, that movie."

So, in short, should you see Piranha 3D?  Well, that depends.  Are you squeamish?  Does copious amounts of nudity offend you?  Do you want a deep story?  Finally, do you want to see a man-eating fish chomp down on a man's tallywacker?  Then no, don't see it.  But if you like blood, boobs and general exploitation, then by all means go...RIGHT NOW!  Much like The A-Team or The Expendables, Piranha 3D is the type of movie that you know if you want to see it or not just by watching the trailer.  If you don't like this kind of movie, seeing it isn't going to change your mind.  But if you do, then you're going to love it (unlike The Expendables, which I'm still rather bitter in my disappointment over).  And chances are, if you like this kind of movie, you've already seen it.  Although, saying that makes it's #6 finish in this weekend's box office all the more disappointing.  In a bright spot, even though Piranha didn't make a ton of money, it also didn't cost a lot of money to make either (which is surprising considering I figured filming in 3D would be quite expensive) so it's already made back almost half its budget and will probably make more in the following weeks, not including overseas business and future video sales.  But on the other side of the coin, Vampires Sucks was also cheap to make and made a shit-ton more money.  Because people are stupid.

And speaking of stupid people, PLEASE don't take your kids to this movie, unlike some of the people in the theater I saw it in.  I don't know judging from ads or the trailer how they concluded that this would be suitable for kids.  But then again, I did convince my parents to take me to see Freddy's Dead all those years ago.  So what the hell, go ahead and take your kids to see this movie.  It's how I learned about sex and violence, and I turned out fine, didn't I?  Trust me, it's how the '80s would've wanted it.