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I'm not a fan of the 3D fad. Whenever possible I see the "2D" versions of movies (yep, even Avatar), but with Piranha 3D only being shown in 3D, I donned the glasses, and risked the potential migraine, for Alexandre Aja's latest gorefest. Piranha did not need to be in 3D. It adds almost nothing.
With only two movies, High Tension and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Aja won me over as a horror filmmaker. His style mixing excessive, realistic blood-letting with purely cinematic goofiness was just the shot in the arm the genre needed when Tension came out and Hills proved a superior remake. After the supernatural mis-step of Mirrors, Piranha finds Aja back in his element. He dives into Roger Corman and Joe Dante's B-movie, rips it apart and rebuilds it, firing on all cylinders for everything it's worth. Using spring break as it's playground, Piranha cramsthe frame with more blood, guts and bodacious, dripping wet bikini clad (or not) female bodies in 90 minutes then 3 other movies. What more could you want in a movie like this?
I've been trying to think of an intelligent argument to make for Piranha... and I just can't. It is what it is. A cheesy, gory, fun drive-in creature feature that is self-aware, both of it's own campy roots and how to play directly to it's gorehound niche audience. Aja knows his way round this type of movie, cutting it like a surgeon and wielding Piranha as a titanic-sized mallet to make the case that he is the undisputed gore king, reigning over Eli Roth, Darren Lynn Bousman and the rest of this generation of Splat Pack directors. Fellow Splat Packer Roth even has a deliciously gruesome cameo here. In fact, Piranha has a full roster of creativity and variety in it's deaths. A refreshing change from the mind-numbing Saw and dumb Final Destination sequels. It is sick shocking fun, done well.
The plot here is thinner than thin. Thinner than Salt. The action mostly focuses on young Jake tagging along with Jerry O'Connell (hamming it up big time here to villainous proportions) while pining for a local girl. Elizabeth Shue is put through a few paces as the sheriff but generally barely registers. The cast is small, the biggest names are limited to one or two scenes (Christopher Lloyd, Richard Dryfuss, Ving Rhames) and the teenagers we're left with aren't fleshed out. The story is small and even the lake-side spring break setting - a ready-made massacre - feels confined. All of the money seems to have gone to those CG fish and prosthetic gore, and admittedly, they do look good. The fish are bad mothers. Like The Host, this movie is another good example of how you really can show the monster early in your horror movie and it will be scary if it is doing scary things.
And that is where Aja and the movie most excel: tone. Aja nails the tone here. He delivers violence and gore that actually shocked me as a fan of his native French horror films. Gore the likes of which I can't remember the last time I saw in a movie theater. Body parts go in the water and they come out bloody, mangled shreds. And he delivers the cheesy, funny absurdity in that same straight-faced tone. This keeps the movie from flying off kilter with horror/comedy shifts and trusts in the audience to pick up the sick, dark laughs themselves. Unlike Drag Me to Hell's sound FX jumps, Aja effectively pulls off shock gags that actually create jumps. The clear camp value and loony tone of all of Aja's films is there, but the intensity of the violence keeps the threat level up and the movie exciting.
My biggest nit-pick here is with the confined feeling of the picture and it's sheer speed. Aja is too preoccupied with making a nimble movie that he cuts from things before they are able to bring to a boil of suspense that would have pushed Piranha over the edge of cheese and into true thriller territory. Had I been Aja I would have laid into a few action scenes (notably the ending) a bit more, milking them for genuine thrills. Renny Harlin pulled this off in Deep Blue Sea. Instead, Piranha waves the white flag, does not make an effort at a genuinely nail-biter and falls back on the crutch of manufactured camp and Jaws references. It only shows how good the movie is that I wished it to take that next step and transcend the genre.
Still, even if a little thicker story could have made this the genuine article, for what it is, Piranha is a fun, sick ride. It's a spring break themed movie with all the hormones of a 14 year old boy, featuring nude synchronized swimming sequence the absurd length of which most people aren't going to mind. It's also a total, go-for-broke, flesh-tearing blood-bath with absolutely no shame or restraints. And sometimes, that is just right. I wish Alexandre Aja would not get pigeon-holed into remakes, but with results like this it's hard to argue.
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