Ridiculous ‘Piranha 3D’ Attempts Record For 3D Gore

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Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – With a record-setting approach to bare breasts and bloodied bodies, Alexandre Aja’s “Piranha 3D” is a ridiculous gore-fest that falls completely flat in terms of character, dialogue, and logic but pops off the screen in the areas in which it really counts for a movie about prehistoric man-eating fish. It’s far-from-perfect and could have been with a few tweaks but “Piranha 3D” is off-the-rails crazy in all the ways that someone buying a ticket to a three-dimensional gore-o-rama wants what’s presented to them to be off-the-rails crazy.

Working from a tongue-in-bloody-cheek script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, Aja opens his remake with a nod to “Jaws” as Richard Dreyfuss drinks and sings while he fishes for bass. After a minor earthquake opens a rift in the lake beneath him, poor Dick captures something much bigger than your average catch and ends up a bloody mess. It turns out that there has been a subterranean lake buried under the Earth for a couple million years and the maniacal creatures that have lived down there have gone a little stir crazy. Just in time for Spring Break.

For the next hour or so, “Piranha 3D” is mostly boob-filled set-up as drunken, bikini-clad party-goers have no idea what’s about to hit them. Some will be turned off by the dozens of shots of swimming fish (often from piranha P.O.V., something that I’m not sure has ever happened in a film before) and wish that the movie would “get to the good stuff” but Aja is merely counting down until the insanity begins. And I mean insanity.

Piranha 3D
Photo credit: Gene Page/Dimension Films

What most people will remember about “Piranha 3D” is a roughly fifteen-minute centerpiece in the final act that will send gorehounds to Amazon to pre-order their copy of the film. With the same kind of goreful glee as “Dead-Alive,” you can practically hear Aja giggling like a mad scientist as he unleashes total chaos on literally dozens of victims. Only a few of the many “joys” of this simply insane climax include a controversial horror director’s head being lopped off by a motorboat, a cheesy actor being torn in half, a girl being scalped by a propeller blade, and literally dozens of starlets being ripped into pieces. It’s nuts. And I mean that in a good way.

The victims and heroes of “Piranha 3D” include the local Sheriff (Elisabeth Shue), one of her partners (Ving Rhames), a team of investigators brought in after the earthquake (Adam Scott, Dina Meyer, & Ricardo Chavira), the Sheriff’s son Jake (Steven R. McQueen, grandson of the legendary actor), Jake’s crush Kelly (Jessica Szohr), and a sleazy take on “Girls Gone Wild” creator Joe Francis (Jerry O’Connell). Most of them will end up fish food in truly nauseating ways.

Piranha 3D
Photo credit: Gene Page/Dimension Films

The director of “High Tension” and “The Hills Have Eyes” is like a bull in a china shop as he throws more boobs and blood at the screen than the 3D trend of the day has ever seen before. It takes a long time to get going but the centerpiece of “Piranha,” in which the awesomely rendered killing machines go absolutely nuts on hundreds of vacationing hardbodies, is simply must-see viewing for fans of the horror genre. It’s as if Aja is going for record-breaking in terms of “most 3D breasts” and “most 3D blood.” For the right horror fan, the attempt at such lunacy will be respected in a time when most horror films have no guts whatsoever.

As for typical things like performance and dialogue. McQueen gets the most screen time in “Piranha” and the sad fact is that the young actor has not quite been handed the same natural charisma as his grandfather. There’s a stronger version of “Piranha” with a more charismatic lead and Szhor, Shue, O’Connell, and Scott are fun but not as memorable as one would hope. The fish steal the film.

But isn’t that kind of the way it should be? As severed body parts fly into the audience in glorious 3D, Aja and his team have given audiences exactly what they should expect from a film like this one. The wave of horror films in the wake of the success of M. Night Shyamalan has somewhat lost a bit of the joyful mayhem that was a bigger part of the genre in the ’70s and ’80s. Sometimes horror fans just want to see something totally insane. “Piranha 3D” is totally insane in all the ways that a horror fan hoped it would be.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com