Replace Teeth with Teets and the poster is still true

As a busy father of two young girls, I have very little time to go to the theater to see movies that aren’t filled with talking animals or wizards named Harry.  Most of my movie watching happens at home, in my recliner, on the big screen HDTV.  I’m normally content with this, but every so often a film comes out that I feel the need to see with a hundred other people in an uncomfortable seat after having spent too much money on candy that I didn’t even really want, all while sipping a titanic sized soda that will inevitably make me have to pee before the movie’s over.  Yay for theaters.  On August 20th, a film swam into theaters that seemed worth one of these rare excursions: Piranha 3D!

This is a B-Movie in every sense of the phrase, and the saving grace is that it knows it. The plot can be fully explained in a single, short sentence: Earthquake releases Mesolithic Piranha into a spring break lake.  Boom – there you have it.  You need to know nothing else, and every other plot detail you discover will only serve to bore you.  You won’t care about the characters or their arcs.  In fact,  your interest in the characters of Piranha 3D will be limited to only a question of their life span, which is exactly as it should be.  One of the biggest problems with the movie is that it tries to convince you the characters DO matter by spending an inordinate amount of time with them, but we’ll get into that more later.

This scene with Kelly Brook never happened.

“Blood and boobies” should be the tag line on every ad for Piranha 3D.  If those words titillate you, then you are a probably a boy, and you won’t be disappointed.  Despite the first half hour of set-up that you’re going to be forced to endure, you’ll be treated with plenty of what you came for.  There is a lot of nudity even by B-Movie standards, and there are scenes of cartoonish violence that rival the likes of the all-time goriest film ever made, Dead Alive.  If you’re in it for the “Boobs” you’ll be treated to an extended, underwater lesbian tryst set to music that belongs in a soft core porn film instead of this one, but I’m not complaining.  If the “Blood” is what you’re looking for then you’ll no doubt clap in glee when a girl gets her face ripped off after her hair gets caught in a boat propellor or when everyone’s least favorite Stand By Me alum, Jerry O’Connell, gets his penis bitten off.  These are only a couple of the scenes that stand out, but the film is littered with similar treats.

There are 4 things in this picture you'll be seeing more of.

While I’m a sucker for gore as well as a big fan of breasts, I get enough of those from my home viewing experience to keep me appeased.  Those two things alone aren’t enough to get me to the theater.  However, this is a 3D flick, and despite my numerous bad experiences with Hollywood’s newest gimmick, I still worry that I’ll be missing something special if I don’t see 3D films in the theater.  Sometimes that may be true (Avatar & Monsters vs Aliens) but this time it wasn’t.  The 3D in Piranha is bad, which is a shame when your film relies so heavily on gore and nudity, two things that 3D should make better.  The director, Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes remake, High Tension) wanted to take advantage of the technology in all of the cheesy ways that the horror schlock fests of the 80’s did.  Expect to see multiple weapons, breasts, and body parts thrust into the screen, as well as the occasional vomit, but very little of it works.  Oddly, the best bits of 3D by a long shot happen under water, making me guess that the crew had to use special, expensive cameras for those scenes that were not used in the rest of the movie.  The parts with the divers exploring the underwater fissure features the most awe-inspiring cinematography in the movie, and its really not that great.

"Eat this, mother fucker!"

The story line is driven by two characters, Elizabeth Shue as the town’s sheriff and her son, an instantly forgettable teen archetype that you’ve already met in a thousand other films.  Piranha 3D is obviously following the same plot as another famous underwater-baddie-gone-wild movie and lets you know it right off the bat as Richard Dreyfuss, made famous for his role in Jaws, is the first victim of the fishies.  Perhaps he should have gotten a bigger boat – sorry, I couldn’t resist.  His appearance is the first in a long line of surprisingly effective actors pitching in for a paycheck.  You’ll get a chance to see Ving Rhames wield a shotgun and a motor boat in his fight against the aquatic demons as well as Christopher Lloyd in an underutilized role as a marine biologist.  And if the name Kelly Brook means anything to you, which it doesn’t to me, but apparently she is famous and well loved, then you’ll delight in knowing she bares all in the under water lesbian ballet.

There is a lot to love about this movie, but there is enough to hate to keep me from recommending that you run out to see it.  While it is lascivious enough to delight, it sabotages itself with one of the worst horror film cliches of all time.  Elizabeth Shue’s character is saddled with three kids, the aforementioned teen cardboard cut out and two less-than-tween screen gobblers that will do everything in their power to suck all life out of the movie.  They are the main character’s children, so when they don’t die in the first 15 minutes we all understand that they are invincible, yet we are forced to watch them “survive” through a couple idiotic situations that only serve to place other adults in danger.  Yes, children in movies suck, and this film joins the avalanche of others that long ago proved this rule.

If you think you’ll enjoy Piranha 3D, then you will.  Go into it expecting it to be exactly what it is and you’ll walk away pleased. You won’t be running into the streets begging everyone else to experience it too so that you can talk to them about it, but when someone says they’ve seen it, you’ll smile and start talking about one scene or another that made you laugh.  It is gory, filled with nudity, and never takes itself too seriously.  It wants you to treat it the same way it’s going to treat you: with a wink, a smile, and an exposed nipple or two.

I give Piranha 3D a fitting 3 out of 5 ships.