Review: Piranha 3D (2010)

 Piranha 3D (2010)

Rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

There's really no way to describe Piranha 3D as anything other than a guilty pleasure. A loose remake of the shameless 1978 Jaws ripoff Piranha, it is an 88-minute parade of sleaze and excess that not only got the Eli Roth stamp of approval (he has a cameo as the host of a wet T-shirt contest) but was directed by one of his "Splat Pack" contemporaries, Alexandre Aja, and is filled with so much gore and nudity that merely having the Blu-ray in the same room as a child is enough to get you put on some kind of registry. In case you couldn't tell by the title, it was a 3D movie originally, and it throws that in your face constantly with all manner of objects jumping out at the screen. It's a movie where a man gets his dick bitten off, two piranha fight over it, and then the winner of that fight coughs up the tattered pieces of that dick right into your face. It knows exactly what it is, and like the spring breakers getting devoured on screen, it says "fuck it, YOLO" and delivers the most ridiculous, over-the-top version of itself it can possibly think of, this time without the constraints of budget or good taste that held back its '70s predecessor. It's a frankly superior film to the original, and the kind of splatterfest that never once takes itself seriously, and likely would never have worked if it even tried to. But work it does, and while its faults are plainly visible, the vibes here are just right for it to overcome them.

Moving the setting to the resort town of Lake Victoria, Arizona (a fictionalized version of Lake Havasu City where this was filmed), the film starts with an earthquake opening a fissure at the bottom of the town's namesake lake, where a horde of prehistoric piranha from a species thought extinct turn out to have survived, millennia of cannibalism and natural selection having turned them into the ultimate aquatic predators. Those piranha escape and become a threat to every living thing in the lake -- and unfortunately, it just so happens that Lake Victoria is a massive spring break destination whose beaches are currently awash in thousands upon thousands of debauched, drunken college kids and the gross, lecherous sleazeballs there to exploit that sea of fine, moist pussy.

And this movie's already turned me into one of them with the way I'm now talking. There's no (pardon the pun) beating around the bush here. The sex and nudity in this movie are copious and gratuitous, whether we're on the beach surrounded by women in various states of undress or on the boat of the softcore porn producer Derrick Jones. One of the highlights of the film is a lengthy, nude, underwater erotic dance between Kelly Brook and porn star Riley Steele that leaves nothing to the imagination and has no illusions about being anything other than the gleefully shameless exploitation it is. It's 2000s Ed Hardy/Von Dutch bro culture at its most lurid and trashy, and while the film is undoubtedly a parody of that culture where a lot of the entertainment comes from watching these idiots get slaughtered, it's the kind of parody that's chiefly interested in broad farce rather than deeper satire, jacking up the most extreme elements of it to their logical conclusion and letting them run wild from there.

And you know what? I loved it. It was a version of that culture that had just enough self-awareness to feel like it was in on its own joke instead of serving it all up completely straight. The protagonists, tellingly, aren't douchebro jackasses and their airheaded eye candy girlfriends cut from that cloth, but people who have to put up with all that nonsense in their backyards because it makes them money, and are the only ones afforded much dignity once the piranha reach the beach. The sheriff Julie and her deputy Fallon, Julie's teenage son Jake and her little kids Zane and Laura, Jake's girlfriend Kelly, the scientists Novak, Paula, and Sam studying the earthquake, these characters are all treated mostly seriously even if they're all pretty two-dimensional. The main representative of the spring breakers, Derrick, is the most antagonistic human character in the film, somebody with no redeeming qualities who melts down and turns into a petty tyrant aboard his boat as everything starts to go wrong for him and his production. Others among that crowd wind up getting themselves and others killed with their own dumb decisions, whether it's refusing to listen to the warnings of impending doom, climbing over each other to get out of the water, flipping over a massive floating stage that wasn't designed to hold so many people, or stealing a boat and running over numerous people in an attempt to escape. The deleted scenes and unused storyboards get even more vicious. This feels like a movie that hates spring break culture and everything it represents, one that I can easily picture proving quite popular among locals in places that get lots of rowdy tourists, a graphic depiction of what they'd love to see happen one day.

"Graphic" is the operative word here, too. If the first half of this film is a parade of T&A, then the second half is devoted to watching all those choice cuts of meat get served up and torn to shreds. This is an absolute gorefest, and Alexandre Aja is a master of the craft. Everything you can picture piranha doing to somebody gets done, and probably some other stuff you never dreamed of. The big, brutal attack on the beach is one that this movie builds to for half its runtime, and when it arrives, it is one for the ages, a carnival of carnage that lasts for several minutes and keeps coming up with creative new ways to kill people. Boobs and blood are combined with reckless abandon, such as in the paragliding scene, a gag involving breast implants, and one highlight moment involving a high-tension wire. While the piranha themselves were created with CGI, the actual gore was almost entirely done practically by the KNB EFX Group, and it is the kind of gross shit that they've made their name with, a vividly detailed anatomy lesson as you get to see all the ways a human body can come apart. At times, it felt like the only thing keeping the film from an instant NC-17 rating was that the water was too clouded by blood (roughly 80,000 gallons of fake blood were used on set) to see the worst of it. Even though this movie isn't particularly scary and never really tries to be, the sheer scale of the bloodbath is harrowing in its own way, like watching a terrorist attack, accident, or other mass-casualty event and its aftermath. The film's darkly comedic tone was the only thing keeping it from turning outright grim, and it was not through lack of effort from Aja or the effects team.

The humans aren't the only ones who get torn up, either, as the protagonists give as good as they get. Ving Rhames as Fallon has a great scene where he goes to town on a swarm of piranha with a boat propeller, and Elisabeth Shue makes for a likable action heroine as Julie, one who manages to say a lot with just the look on her face and the tone of her voice, especially when she realizes how badly her son Jake fucked up in more ways than one. When they reunite, there's a sense that she's gonna fuckin' kill him for what he did long before she outright says it. Christopher Lloyd steals the show as the marine biologist on land, one whose only role is to deliver an infodump on the piranha but does it so well that he felt like he had a much larger role than he did. The actors playing the kids and the teenagers were mostly alright, but their section of the film is seriously livened up by the presence of Jerry O'Connell as Derrick, a parody of the infamous Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis. O'Connell plays him as a guy approaching middle age who peaked in high school and college and has spent the rest of his life reliving and trying to recapture his youth, an absolute scumbag who doesn't seem to know or care about the definitions of words like "consent" or "age of consent". He was like a more comedic version of Wayne in X, a pervert who represents everything wrong with "adult entertainment", but whereas that film was a gritty and grounded one about how mainstream beauty standards and the porn industry fetishize youth and objectify people, this is a Grand Guignol orgy of mayhem where depicting him as a bastard who constantly causes problems throughout the film chiefly means setting him up to die painfully in a way designed to make the crowd roar.

It was that tone that really carried this movie through rough spots that would've sank other, more serious films. There's a minor character, Derrick's cameraman/boat pilot Andrew, who disappears without explanation, implied to have been killed but his death scene cut from the film (it appears in the deleted scenes). The actors are good, but barring Derrick, their characters are all pretty shallow archetypes. Some of the CGI, especially during Richard Dreyfuss' cameo/death in the opening scene, could be pretty dire. I'm not surprised to learn that work on the CGI for this was, by all accounts, an absolute shitshow to the point that Aja threatened to have his name taken off the credits unless Dimension Films ponied up some more money to finish the effects work. It may be parodying the Four Loko spring break culture of the time, but it also feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too with how much the first half lingers on nudity. Christopher Lloyd really should've been in it more. But I was able to put all of that aside for one simple reason: I was just having too much goddamn fucking fun watching this.

The Bottom Line

This is a "hell yeah!" movie, one you throw on when your friends are over, there are no kids around, and you just wanna spend an hour and a half goofing off and having a blast with a sick, mean-spirited, yet incredibly fun horror/comedy.