Piranha 3-D

There is a trend throughout the Piranha films.  Piranha 2 has more nudity than Piranha.  The 1995 remake of Piranha has more nudity than Piranha 2.  This means that as time goes by, more nudity is in each subsequent film.  This trend continues with Piranha 3-D which features numerous porn stars, a character made out to be the guy who created Girls Gone Wild, and some Spring Break festivities.

I should take some time to name off some of the people featured in this one, since you might know a few of them.  Elisabeth Shue stars as the sheriff of a beach town.  Ving Rhames is her deputy.  Richard Dreyfus plays the first kill, who dropped a beer bottle that caused an earthquake on the lakebed.  Adam Scott and Dina Meyer play two of the three people coming to investigate the earthquake.  Christopher Lloyd plays a fish expert.  Jerry O’Connell plays the sleazy Wild Wild Girls director, and his cameraman is Paul Scheer.  Um...Elisabeth Shue’s son is played by actor Steve McQueen’s grandson Steve McQueen.  I forget his middle initial.  I also don’t know how well I spelled the names and it is past 1am so I’m not feeling like looking up the spellings.  Sorry to those who are misspelled.  Oh, and Eli Roth is in here as a guy running a wet t-shirt contest.  If you don’t know some of them...you don’t know some of them.  Simple as that.

The plot of the movie is that an earthquake on the lakebed floor opened up a passage to another underground lake.  There were killer piranha in that second lake.  They get loose.  It’s Spring Break in a beach town.  The piranha go after the spring breakers.  That’s all you need to know about the story.

What can I say about this movie aside from how fun it is?  The movie is over the top, ridiculousness.  There’s a sleazy director.  There is a lot of nudity coming from quite a few porn stars.  There is a piranha that coughs up a penis.  There’s a wet t-shirt contest.  People don’t listen to the police.  There are also a lot of violent deaths.  If none of this interests you, you probably won’t like this movie.

Even if you don’t like the movie, you can surely appreciate the way it looks.  The green of the grass, the brown of the sand and dirt, the crisp blue of the water.  All of the colours pop.  This is possibly the best looking horror movie in terms of actual vivid colour that I have seen in a long time.

I feel like the direction and acting for Piranha 3-D are good.  Aja knows how to direct horror.  He may not be able to follow through on having a movie that makes sense (see: High Tension), but he can sure make a suspenseful, thrilling, fun, and good looking movie.  Different amounts of each of those for his different films, obviously.  All of the actors play their roles in what I would say is the perfect way.  Jerry O’Connell should be of note since he embodied the sleazy director in a way that I’m not sure anyone else could have.

So, basically...this was a drawn out way of me saying I like Piranha 3-D but can completely understand if you don’t.  I’m excited for Piranha 3-DD but with two assumed dead characters returning, it’ll likely be crap.  I mean, if the title was Piranha 3-DD: Resurrection, it would be exactly right, but it’s not.