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People-chomping fish prove intentionally hilarious in Piranha 3-D’s high camp fun
By
Morgan P Salvo


Piranha 3-D is not necessarily a good movie but it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. The fact that it doesn’t skimp on the blood, gore, carnage, splatter, along with bouncing bikini-clad, well-endowed women unafraid to take off their tops and swim naked might just give it three stars right there. Throw in the demonic flesh-ripping meat chewing little sea-devils and you have a CGI masterpiece of underwater hideousness.
Starting off with a cameo of Richard Dreyfuss looking like Hemmingway’s “Old Man in the Sea” and parodying Jaws to the hilt, Piranha is a patent set up for 70’s horror extravagance. Its Spring break at Victoria Lake and prehistoric piranhas are released from an underwater cave by an earthquake, ready to wreak havoc on the drunken half-naked partiers. The sub plot of a “Wild Wild Girls” video shoot is where it gets the most comically absurd. The bumping and grinding to bad disco/beat/house music is pretty hilarious, but nothing will prepare you for the beach front piranha attack melee and ensuing blood drenched slaughter of the party animals. I haven’t laughed this hard in years.

The huge plot loopholes and ridiculous pedestrian dialogue can be forgiven as Director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Hills Have Eyes) nods to all things held sacred in 70’s schlock horror, even including a homage to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie and its splattery effects. The original Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles, pulled off intended high camp with cheesy glory. Here Piranha 3D’s amped to the max and all the cheese left intact. Elizabeth Shue plants tongue firmly in cheek to play the stern sheriff/mom, Adam Scott is the weirdly subdued scientist, Christopher Lloyd psychotically mumbles through the fish authority-mad-scientist role, Eli Roth provides yet another stupid cameo and gruff-yet-fair Ving Rhames goes turbo, killing the demon fish with an outboard motorboat engine.

This movie is drive-in classic personified: grisly flesh hanging off limbs, swimming piranha eye lens, tequila body shots and even an underwater nude mermaid porn ballet. The 3-D excels underwater but not in the long drawn out plot babbling scenes. The Jaws-like paranoia never reaches the nail biting realm but when these herds of fish-with-teeth start hauling-ass it’s a blood spurting frenzy payday. The gore fills the screen with such panoramic blood letting I wanted to watch this movie again immediately to see what was going on in the wide shots.
Yep, P3-D is a special trashy movie with unrelenting, heinous gore and splatter, and an overabundance of gratuitous nudity. My only complaint was that at 90 minutes it was way too short.

Piranha 3-D
Starring Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames
Directed by Alexandre Aja

 4 stars