Fish, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll
Piranha 3D USA 2010
Directed by Alexandre Aja
Entertainment In Video Region 2
Okay...
so Piranha 3D is one of the most non-politically correct, sexist pieces
of cinematic trash committed to celluloid. The whole movie feels like
it was written to be the worst ever, unsubtle “Carry On film on acid”
there ever was... it objectifies women to a disturbing degree and
contradicts all its own subtext just for the sake of extra violent gore.
Now...
bearing in mind everything I just wrote then, I have to admit that I
found this film to be, not only everything I was expecting from all of
the previous Piranha films (they all failed to deliver) but also to be
generally better made than all its predecessors too. I actually kind of
enjoyed it somewhat... although everything inside me is telling me
that’s probably wrong.
Now
I have to confess here that, while the DVD has the 3D version and a
couple of sets of (way too small for an average head wearing normal
glasses) 3D glasses to watch it by... I only lasted a few minutes on
this print. I just couldn’t get the 3D to work properly and I got tired
of watching double images all over the movie. So I gave up for the sake
of a speedier afternoon and switched discs to the 2D version. Sorry
about this but it had to be done.
My first big
criticism is that it does exactly the opposite of what the awful 90s TV
remake did... in that it isn’t in any way a remake. Now what I would
have liked to have seen was for this to be an alternative, improved
version of the original material, with some characters and places still
in the movie... but this one not only dispenses with all of the
characters from the first movie... it also throws out the plot
completely. This school of Piranhas are not the military engineered
killers invented to put an end to the Vietnam war before the funding
was withdrawn, as they were in the Joe Dante movie. In this one a
completely unexplained tremor opens a rift under a lake which lets
loose various prehistoric, baby piranha which are thought to have
been extinct for, like, a gazillion years. These are the toothed
killers that do all the fleshy damage in this movie and the plot of the
original never, unfortunately, rears its head on this one at all.
The
film starts a lot better than I thought it would with a fishing Richard
Dreyfuss being the newly released fishies first victim. Not only that
but, to boot, he’s singing “Show me the way to go home” just like he
did in Jaws. So this movie starts off by smartly playing with a dead-on
reference to the film the original Piranha movie from 1978 was trying
to cash in on. Unfortunately, this standard of post-modernistic japery
is not prevalent for most of the movie and very quickly this film
becomes all about the cinematic worship of female breasts. Now as a
spirited male individual I have to say that I did greatly enjoy the
profusion of female flesh displayed in this movie, which is easily the
most exploitational in the series so far, but I also found myself
pretty much cringing at the male derogatory attitudes towards women to
be found on display in this story. I have to admit that, by the end of
the movie, my head and my groin were feeling fairly conflicted and
confused by this experience.
The
effects and goriness are mostly impressive... a lot of people come to
horrendously nasty ends which gives this killer fish movie a bit more
bite than its predecessors. Now I don’t usually like gore for gore’s
sake but there were a couple of bits of bloody death in this one which
weren’t completely fish related and had an edge because they were
completely unexpected.
One
sequence which was interesting is when an out-of-control electrical
cable accidentally slices a woman diagonally in half through the
cleavage. It takes a while for both the audience and the victim to
realise what just happened, as the lady in question watches as her top
bits gradually slide away from the rest of her body. Another inventive
sequence of goriness is when a lady being bitten by lively fish gets
her long hair caught in the outboard motor of a boat being driven by a
fleeing teenage boy. When he finally gets the motor restarted it scalps
the woman, tearing half of her skin from her head.
Little
touches like this are, it should be acknowledged, fairly grotesque but
also somewhat satisfying when mixed in with the other fish related
carnage. These sequences raised the bar a little on the expectations of
what a movie like this could give it’s audience and you have to applaud
it a little for not just relying on nibbly teeth to comply with the
appetite of the gore-gore crowd.
There’s
a lot of humour in the film, especially the last few seconds following
the revelations as to the nature of these particular predators by a
fish expert played by Christopher Lloyd (it was also nice to see
Christopher Lloyd and Elizabeth Shue working together again since their
time on the second and third Back To The Future movies) but, for the
most part, this movie relies too much on jokes relating to various bits
of female anatomy to the point where it kinda wears you down a little.
It works fine for the first couple of one-liners but after a while it
just gets old really fast.
As
a red blooded male I have to say that Piranha 3D has a lot of bosomy
women on screen, so it’s not a film I found boring on any level. At the
same time, I can’t bring myself to recommend a film that treats women
as objects as much as this one does (even with Shue playing such a
strong female lead). Ultimately, if you want to see a movie with loads
of nudity (some of it quite stunning, it has to be acknowledged) and
violence towards... um... anything human, then you’re probably going to
end up watching this one whether you want to or not at some point.
Either way, I’m almost looking forward to seeing the sequel when it
comes to cinemas soon. Review to follow shortly.
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