Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 3, 2010
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
Just like certain things go well together, some things should not be mixed. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich tastes great, but who in his right mind would eat pickles and ice cream? Along those same lines, as someone who’s trying to live by what he learned in Sunday school, I see some movies and skip others. For me, watching “Piranha 3D” was like eating pickles and ice cream; the movie and I didn’t agree with each other. However, your experience might differ.
“Piranha 3D” is a drunken, sex-crazed tribute to hedonistic excess. Set during spring break on a landlocked lake, the movie begins by whipping a few thousand college students into a hormonal frenzy, complete with thumping music, dancing, alcohol and more skin than a party at the Playboy Mansion. Then director Alexandre Aja shoves a chainsaw into the pulsating mass and cranks it up.
The results are not pretty. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, including unrated classics like Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive” and the original “Dawn of the Dead,” but nothing that could touch the magnum opus of gore Aja pulls off in “Piranha 3D.”
Survivors pull half-eaten bodies out of the water; a cable whips through a girl’s midsection, then the top half of her body slides off her torso; and one of the titular creatures chews its way out of a girl’s mouth while her boyfriend watches in horror. In one memorable scene, the driver of a motorboat plows through dozens of teenagers in an attempt to escape the slaughter. When a girl’s hair gets tangled up in the boat’s blades, he restarts the engine anyway, taking her face with him but leaving the rest of her behind.
Aja leaves nothing to the imagination, nor does he stop with one or two creative kills. Once the fish start biting, “Piranha 3D” turns into a non-stop meat grinder.
From a technical standpoint, the carnage is impressive. The practical effects look like what I assume the real thing would, and the computer-generated deaths (usually the weak point in a horror movie) are quite good. If you see “Piranha 3D,” you won’t spend any time poking fun at the effects.
I would like to unsee “Piranha 3D,” but I can’t. I say that only because you need to know what to expect going in. I’ve read online comments by people who loved the movie, and I’ve spoken with someone who was expecting “Jaws” and left the theater shell-shocked. (Maybe Aja should have called the movie “Jaws Gone Wild.”)
As a movie critic, however, I’m compelled to be objective. With that in mind, I have to
say “Piranha 3D” is a good movie. It’s trash, but it’s well-made trash.
Aja builds suspense for the first hour, introducing us to Jake, a young man who lives near the lake. Viewers also meet Jake’s brother and sister, his mother, the girl he likes and an adult filmmaker, who convinces him to be a location scout for the movie he’s shooting. When an underwater tremor frees a school of prehistoric man-eating fish, these characters band together in an attempt to warn the spring breakers and survive.
Early on, there’s a nice scene in which two seismologists dive underwater to explore a massive crack in the Earth the tremor created. The sequence reminded me of movies like “Alien” and “The Thing,” in which the audience knows there’s a monster out there, but it hasn’t struck yet. The underwater photography is nice, especially in 3D.
Aja also orchestrates a tense finale. Everyone in “Piranha 3D” is fair game, making the final moments of the movie truly suspenseful. While Aja is no Steven Spielberg, he has a solid grasp of framing and pacing, and I liked that he didn’t give any of his characters a cheap escape.
I also smiled at the appearance of Richard Dreyfuss as a fisherman who provides the piranha with their first taste of human tissue in two million years. He plays the role dressed in the same clothes his character in “Jaws” wore. The brief performance by Christopher Lloyd as a kooky expert on prehistoric fish was also a pleasure to watch. He seems to be channeling his Doc Brown character from the “Back to the Future” movies.
While “Piranha 3D” has its good points, it still made me feel like one of those old men who say things like, “When I was young, a scary movie would have a little skinny dippin’, Jason would stab somebody in the eye, and we’d leave happy, dagnabbit! Kids these days gotta waller in the stuff!” I don’t actually know any old men who say that, but you get my point.
My personal reservations aside, if “Piranha 3D” sounds like your cup of tea, I believe you’ll enjoy it. But if you steer clear of movies with gratuitous sex and gore, then you should see something else.
Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.
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