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Before Alexandre Aja gets down to the business of Piranha 3-D, you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe the horror director is trying his hand at porn. Not because so many breasts are on display -- though there are some, to be sure, and far more than the average horror remakes of amped-up violence and clamped-down sex -- but more the way our teenage hero Jake (Steven McQueen) finds himself recruited to work as location scout for Girls Gone Wild-style producer Derrick Jones (Jerry O'Connell), visiting Jake's hometown to cover what seems like an unusually raucous spring break for a lake in the middle of Arizona. Plucked from affable Pixies-shirt/Radiohead poster/Hollywood-style handsome social-outcast status, Jake gets to rub elbows, among other parts, with busty models as well as his somewhat more demure crush Julie (Jessica Szohr).
The dream gig doesn't last long; a few body shots, one naked water ballet and a babysitting mishap later, he's on a boat fighting off killer prehistoric piranhas, unleashed from a lake-within-a-lake by a recent earthquake...but Christopher Lloyd, back in the field of mad science, can explain it so much better than I can. The point is, these fish are mean, hungry, and more than able to cut down a seminaked human to the even-more-bare essentials in a minute or two flat (no cows are brought in for experimental purposes, a wasted opportunity if you ask me).
Aja cuts between Jake's journey, such as it is, and an investigation conducted by Jake's sheriff mom Julie (Elisabeth Shue); like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, she tries to warn water-partiers away, but it's too late -- even for Dreyfuss, who puts in an early sacrificial cameo, not quite playing Matt Hooper, but close enough. Fortunately, "too late" is exactly what we're looking for, resulting as it does in a centerpiece sequence wherein hundreds of spring breakers are laid to waste by even more hundreds of piranha.
This is the reason Piranha 3-D exists, and Aja delivers truly imaginative levels of gore and mayhem. He's always been fascinated by the squishy, stretchy, splattery potential of the human body; even a dull exercise like Mirrors has a scene where Amy Smart pulls apart her own face. His earlier horrors have a grim, sometimes unforgiving intensity; his version of Piranha, wisely, does not. Lloyd and O'Connell chew scenery with abandon; dry comedian Adam Scott, playing a scuba-diving paleontologist, looks unflappable on a jetski toting a shotgun; and even with that kind of occasional bravado, the humans don't really stand a chance. The little beasts snack on legs, eyes, and some far more personal appendages, and the battlefield-level results are displayed in gleefully macabre makeup and effects work by some of the George Romero team.
The practical gore, knowing corniness, and dips into a late night cable-porn aesthetic makes this just about the perfect throwback horror movie for the eighties prom that was summer 2010, and unlike some other revivers, Aja seems to understand what was fun about the old junk he has in mind. Even the title Piranha 3-D sounds retro, though the official name is actually just plain old Piranha; while there have been two previous Piranha movies, this is not a third installment so much as a re-ripoff. The Joe Dante original was a self-aware Roger Corman version of Jaws, and I guess this is a self-aware effects update of Dante.
This makes it a lot of disposable fun, though unlike Dante's Looney Tunes-inspired best, the new Piranha's wit is confined almost entirely to its inventive demises and occasional splashes of 3-D gimmickry -- it's a post-production conversion job, but a long-planned and lovingly cheesy one. The movie is nicely lean, with its softcore set-up, gory follow-through, and mild suspense toward the end, though it also can feel as hacked up as one of its victims.
In fact, for an eighty-minute movie depending on a handful of big, extended set pieces, it features a surprisingly deep B-movie supporting cast -- Lloyd, Scott, Ving Rhames, former Starship Trooper Dina Meyer, comedian Paul Scheer -- that suggests any number of additional subplots gnashed away in editing and re-editing. That story stuff, hey, we can make do without, but I wonder if scissors were taken to some of the mayhem, too. The most telling cuts, for a campy gorehounding movie like this, are when a recognizable actor dies off-screen.
The dream gig doesn't last long; a few body shots, one naked water ballet and a babysitting mishap later, he's on a boat fighting off killer prehistoric piranhas, unleashed from a lake-within-a-lake by a recent earthquake...but Christopher Lloyd, back in the field of mad science, can explain it so much better than I can. The point is, these fish are mean, hungry, and more than able to cut down a seminaked human to the even-more-bare essentials in a minute or two flat (no cows are brought in for experimental purposes, a wasted opportunity if you ask me).
Aja cuts between Jake's journey, such as it is, and an investigation conducted by Jake's sheriff mom Julie (Elisabeth Shue); like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, she tries to warn water-partiers away, but it's too late -- even for Dreyfuss, who puts in an early sacrificial cameo, not quite playing Matt Hooper, but close enough. Fortunately, "too late" is exactly what we're looking for, resulting as it does in a centerpiece sequence wherein hundreds of spring breakers are laid to waste by even more hundreds of piranha.
This is the reason Piranha 3-D exists, and Aja delivers truly imaginative levels of gore and mayhem. He's always been fascinated by the squishy, stretchy, splattery potential of the human body; even a dull exercise like Mirrors has a scene where Amy Smart pulls apart her own face. His earlier horrors have a grim, sometimes unforgiving intensity; his version of Piranha, wisely, does not. Lloyd and O'Connell chew scenery with abandon; dry comedian Adam Scott, playing a scuba-diving paleontologist, looks unflappable on a jetski toting a shotgun; and even with that kind of occasional bravado, the humans don't really stand a chance. The little beasts snack on legs, eyes, and some far more personal appendages, and the battlefield-level results are displayed in gleefully macabre makeup and effects work by some of the George Romero team.
The practical gore, knowing corniness, and dips into a late night cable-porn aesthetic makes this just about the perfect throwback horror movie for the eighties prom that was summer 2010, and unlike some other revivers, Aja seems to understand what was fun about the old junk he has in mind. Even the title Piranha 3-D sounds retro, though the official name is actually just plain old Piranha; while there have been two previous Piranha movies, this is not a third installment so much as a re-ripoff. The Joe Dante original was a self-aware Roger Corman version of Jaws, and I guess this is a self-aware effects update of Dante.
This makes it a lot of disposable fun, though unlike Dante's Looney Tunes-inspired best, the new Piranha's wit is confined almost entirely to its inventive demises and occasional splashes of 3-D gimmickry -- it's a post-production conversion job, but a long-planned and lovingly cheesy one. The movie is nicely lean, with its softcore set-up, gory follow-through, and mild suspense toward the end, though it also can feel as hacked up as one of its victims.
In fact, for an eighty-minute movie depending on a handful of big, extended set pieces, it features a surprisingly deep B-movie supporting cast -- Lloyd, Scott, Ving Rhames, former Starship Trooper Dina Meyer, comedian Paul Scheer -- that suggests any number of additional subplots gnashed away in editing and re-editing. That story stuff, hey, we can make do without, but I wonder if scissors were taken to some of the mayhem, too. The most telling cuts, for a campy gorehounding movie like this, are when a recognizable actor dies off-screen.
