I’m thinking about offering a number of weekly themed posts, and I originally intended this to be the first of what I was going to call “Saturday, Splatter-day”… but that just seems too overly cheestastic, even for me.
And, honestly, I’m not too keen on viewing or reviewing—in any critical sense anyway—a super-violent, uber-shlocky B-movie each week. (Although, quick note: I reserve the right to make “Saturday, Splatter-day" a real thing at a later date).
But, while I think a little harder about a few possible themes, I’ve decided to make this post the first in a larger series called “Rewind Review”, the idea being that I take a film off of my shelf—either something I own, and have yet to watch, or a rental that recently came in, or even a recording that’s been sitting, neglected, on my DVR—finally watch it, and write about it.
So, without further ado, I give you: Piranha (2010).
- Ethan
Boobs ‘n’ blood… and not much else. That’s it in a nutshell.
Alexandre Aja’s Piranha is actually the second remake of Joe Dante’s original creature-feature of the same name from 1978. I won’t pretend that I’ve actually seen the remake from 1995, but Wikipedia tells me it was produced by Roger Corman—who also released the original under his New World Pictures banner—and reportedly reused the exact same SFX shots from the original film. That sounds wonderfully low budget (also, sort of shitty), but I digress.
Aja’s film opens with one, of three, notable cameos. Richard Dreyfuss plays a character that IMDb calls Matt Boyd—his name is never said—but he looks suspiciously like an aged version of Matt Hooper from Jaws (1975).
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| Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies... oh, wait, that was Quint's favorite, wasn't it. [Sad Face] |
And that’s awesome. He’s decked out in an old man fishing cap, kicking back in a tiny tin boat. Apparently, after killing Bruce the Shark and paddling back to shore with Chief Brody, Hooper retired to Arizona and likes spending his days fishing away his retirement. Also, he still likes singing along to the music on the radio, which just so happens to be playing “Show Me the Way to Go Home”, (although, sadly, Quint isn’t there to sing backup).
It’s a nice reference from Aja and screenwriters Peter Goldfinger & John Stolberg, who are rightfully paying their respect to one of the greatest movies ever made. It's doubly fitting because the original Piranha (1978), and this new remake, are just thinly-veiled ripoffs of Spielberg's masterpiece. And niether film would exist without his tale of the great white that terrorized the vacationers on Amity Island.
One of the only lines Dreyfuss has—besides the singing—is, “boy, that’s a big fish.” The titular piranhas then pull him overboard and tear him to pieces in a frenzy of flailing fish and body parts being ripped to shreds, all as the water turns a nice crimson color.
Cut to: Jake (Steven R. McQueen), a teenager on Spring Break. The girl he likes, Kelly (Jessica Szohr), is back from her first year of college and she kinda wants to hangout, but Jake's too meek to actually ask her out and his Mom is making him watch his younger brother and sister anyway. You see, Mom is actually sheriff of their little town by the lake—a fictitious body of water named Victoria, which is really just Lake Havasu—and she’s too busy reigning in all the drunken college kids to watch over her own.
Sheriff Mommy is played by none other than… Elisabeth Shue! She has the second great cameo, made greater by the fact that the role is actually pretty sizable. In fact, it’s not really a cameo at all, but…come on! It’s Elisabeth Shue, and when was the last time she was in a movie? (Also, Ving Rhames plays her shotgun-toting deputy; when was the last time he was in a good movie?)
Meanwhile, Jake, ever the typical teen, decides he likes sex a hell of a lot more than his mom’s rules, and ditches his bother and sister to spend time with Kelly. The two get caught up in the escapades of eccentric Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell), a pornographer of the Joe “Girls Gone Wild” Francis variety. In other words, he's a grade-A d-bag. Jones is bad news, and likes snorting coke off of his pornstar girlfriend (Kelly Brook) between takes.
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| Derrick also likes to do body shots, appearently. |
So, anyway, after a few scientists—who wanted to study the effects of a recent earthquake on the lake—turn up dead, freaky piranhas suckling the meat off the corpse’s bones, Sheriff Shue and the lone survivor of the research team (Adam Scott) seek help from a crazy marine biologist. Cue third cameo: Christopher Lloyd, who’s in full Doc Brown mode, plays the biologist! He informs them that the mysterious seismic activity opened up a lake beneath the lake, and the pre-Pleistocene piranhas are really, really, really bad. Like cancer multiplied by AIDS, bad.
(Also, at some point, there’s a fourth cameo: Eli Roth gets his face smashed off by a powerboat. Weeee!)
Aja spends about 40, maybe 45, minutes setting this all up, just so he can stage one of the most insanely bloody, depraved and awesomely violent second and third acts in recent memory. It's strangely captivating, in that you don't really want to watch it, but can't look a away at the same time.
In place of a traditional plot there’s blood—lots, and lots, and lots of blood—and gobs of gore, complete with gruesome close-ups of the piranha’s victims. Or at least, what’s left of them. Aja’s camera lingers, allowing—or forcing—the viewer to take in all gnarled and stringy kinda-still-fleshy appendages that used to be legs and arms.
Oh, and that’s right, there’s a ton of nudity too. Most of it is tasteless, but some of it--including a slow-motion interlude of two naked women intertwined underwater, set to "The Flower Duet" from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé--isn't.
All of which is expected, I guess (well, maybe not the art-house-y bit with classical music). After all, Piranha sits somewhere between homage to the B-movies and gory, sexploitation flicks of the 1970s and 80s and just plain being one, with the only difference manifesting in the form of occasionally-shoddy CGI in place of what would’ve been achieved using older optical effects techniques.
Piranha was originally titled Pirahna 3D and was released in theaters with an added dimension. Although it wasn’t actually filmed using newer 3D-native equipment—like the Pace/Cameron FUSION Camera system—it was post-converted into 3D using the reali-D process from InnerD, a company who’s conversions are considered among the best in the business.
Of course, I watched Piranha in 2D, so none of that matters.
In fact, the obvious and gimmicky attempts at making “pop out”—forcing the action at the screen—are just distracting and ridiculous. I suppose that’s part of the charm, though. Like almost everything else in Aja’s Piranha, it all seems very B-movie-grade awful, and is handled adeptly, tongue-firmly-in-cheek.
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| Date, Sunday, November 13th 1955, 7:01 am. Last night's time travel experiment was apparently a complete success... |
Is Piranha a good movie? Hardly. But I'll be damned if it isn't one hell of an entertainingly bad one.
*** out of *****
Directed by: Alexandre Aja
Written by: Peter Goldfinger & John Stolberg; Alexandre Aja (uncredited)
Starring: Steven R. McQueen, Elisabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames, Jessica Szohr with Christopher Lloyd and Richard Dreyfuss
Rated: R, for graphic sex, language, violence, and Richard Dreyfuss
Studio: Dimension/The Weinstein Company
Runtime: 87 minutes
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