Jerry O'Connell in Piranha 3D. Photograph: Allstar/DIMENSION
PIRANHA 3D
An earthquake has opened an undersea chasm, unleashing
a gazillion piranha fish near an Arizona resort town that just happens to be
jammed with spring-break partiers anxious to frolic in the pretty blue lake.
Horny horror-movie revelers tend to deserve what's coming to them, a sentiment
French-born director Alexandre Aja embraces with maniacal glee in a third-act
massacre that's downright ruthless (as was Aja's debut feature, High Tension,
and his remake of The Hills Have Eyes). The human prey get filleted in
3-D, no less, a technology that's deployed effectively—as when one piranha or
another is plucked from the computer-animated horde and paraded past the
moviegoer's nose—but also shamelessly, as when a naked woman points her breasts
directly at the camera and shimmies. Irredeemable, and yet, the movie, written
by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is too funny and the filmmaking too
self-aware to be truly offensive. Some wonder why the Oscar-nominated Elisabeth
Shue agreed to star in such obvious trash, but maybe when she read the part in
the script where the piranha deliver a riotously gruesome but poetically just
comeuppance to the story's most egregiously misogynist man, she laughed her way to
saying, "Yes." (Chuck Wilson)