Brilliantly self-aware of its camp appeal, Piranha 3D is a treat for audiences in on the joke.
If you’re expecting tasteful scares, it’s like expecting a guy to call you back after a one-night-stand. Piranha is exploitation cinema at its finest. Brutally bloody, gratuitously titillating and chock full of hilariously bad dialogue. Your senses will be used and abused in all the right ways.
I’ll admit that I have a huge weakness for schlocky Grindhouse guilty pleasures. But this new and particularly ferocious Piranha is one of the finest. The premise is simple, yet amazing.
A minor earthquake opens up a rift beneath Lake Victoria, releasing an army of vicious, oversized piranha dead-set on eating anything that moves.
Particularly if said thing has a nice rack and a fondness for taking off her bikini in inappropriate times. And these piranhas should have vanished from the Earth over 200 million years ago!
Unfortunately for Lake Victoria and its tough nuts sheriff Julie Forester (Shue), the piranhas are unleashed just in time for Spring Break! So as thousands of collage kids party around the lake, guzzling beer and taking off their tops, the piranhas mount an offensive that couldn’t be gorier.
The story simultaneously follows Julie and her awkward son Jake (Steven McQueen), who is asked to help porn director Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell) shoot Wild Wild Girls action out on the crystal blue lake. Jake gets to come of age by having tequila shooters over Derrick’s naked nymphs, while he should be babysitting his younger siblings.
Director Aja of High Tension and the Hills Have Eyes fame keeps the story to a minimum and never bogs it down with unnecessary subplots. These characters exist solely to fight or feed the swarm, and Aja and his writers give us just what we need to cheer on the ensuing carnage. With the obnoxious O’Connell, sleazy porn starlets, douchebag jocks galore and a wet-t-shirt MC among the fish-food, all in the most epic of ways, audiences should revel in the climactic and cathartic bloodbath.
This is the kind of movie that sacrifices a busty babe to the piranha garbage disposal until only her breast implants float to the top. Torsos are split horizontally and diagonally, limbs chewed to the bone and sexual organs eaten for dessert. One nifty Lord of the Flies sequence has one selfish jerk attempt an escape by riding his motorboat over his comrades. And the heroes that fight back do so with gusto, using shotguns, boat propellers, and even a taser to fend off the scourge.
The exploitation is executed with such top-notch production values to ensure maximum screams, giggles and groans. It’s all played seemingly seriously with quality dramatic acting, making the situation that much more ridiculous.
Only the somewhat shoddy 3D transfer process bring down the overall experience in any way. Piranha is a class-act genre masterpiece.
