Piranha 3D

An Earthquake opens up a cavern under a lake and unleashes thousands of killer piranhas and it happens to be spring break. That one sentence is really all that is needed in terms of telling someone what this movie is about. You have killer fish and spring break. In order to make a successful movie, those two ingredients should be in your dish. When I say Spring Break, I mean the movie/MTV version of Spring Break. We have a sleazy Joe Francis type, Derrick(Jerry O'Connell), there is a wet T-shirt contest with Eli Roth as the Emcee, plenty of hot half naked (two fully naked) people and tons of alcohol. There is not any sex, really, but there are enough bare breasts on display to please any 14yr old boy. We have a few characters we are supposed to care about, including a family where the mother, Julie(Elizabeth Shue) is the sheriff, Jake(Steven R. McQueen), is the lovesick teenager and they also have two cute little kids. Jessica Szohr from television's Gossip Girl provides the love interest and looks great in a bikini and finally Kelly Brook as the sex object.

Of course, if you are coming to watch this movie for the story/plot/characters well you are kind of an idiot. Piranha is about watching piranhas eat and kill unsuspecting people. The first half of the movie we get glimpses of the carnage these underwater killers are capable of, but when the movie really lets loose, it is a full on bloodbath. Offering over the top gore, silly action, cheesy dialog, the aforementioned bare breasts and some classic B-movie style antics, Piranha 3D delivers on its promise in spades. It is the movie Snakes on a Plane was supposed to be. It is the movie B horror movie fans have been quietly clamouring for. It leaves the audience feeling giddy, disgusting and kind of in awe that the movie was able to get away with a lot of the stuff it gets away with.

There is a scene that can only be described as a naked underwater ballet between two gorgeous girls, there is topless windsurfing, a CGI penis being chewed up and spit out and enough CGI missing limbs to satisfy the entire audience of people looking for this type of movie. I know the appeal of such a movie is limited and if you are even hesitant about watching it, just stay away. There is no need for people who are even hesitating about this kind of movie. It is pure direct to DVD glory, but on the big screen and in 3D. To be honest, the 3D did not do anything for me. There are not any real "jumps" that come from the 3D and as a gimmick I have seen horror movies in 3D that were better, but it was not Avatar levels of distracting. The Piranhas look exactly the way I wanted them to look. They did not look too good where you can tell a lot of funny went into them, but they do not look too cheap where it is distracting how awful they look.

The pacing of the movie is nice and the references to other movies and to horror conventions is nice. The deaths get more and more outrageous and there are definitely enough just throw up your hands moments that you know no one is taking this undertaking seriously. Ving Rhames gets the "I'm tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line and he delivers it perfectly as he wields the motor from a motor boat as a weapon to tear through the piranhas. Adam Scott, in a role that makes me wonder who he owed a favor to, is kind of the bad ass in the movie as he saves lives and shoots piranhas like he is an old pro and Elizabeth Shue is there is give the movie a winking 1980s vibe. O'Connell's appearance as a douchetastic soft core porn director feels so close to real life, you wonder if O'Connell has experience.

I do not have much else to say except Christopher Lloyd's delivery of every single line as Mr. Exposition is dripped in B-movie awesomeness. and Richard Dreyfuss' cameo is a wonderful little bit of movie reference, but I wish it had been even less subtle than it was. I want my movies that feature CGI penis, naked underwater ballet, bloodied and missing limbs, and cheesy looking fish to be void of any sense of subtlety.

Final Grade: I cannot really grade this kind of movie