Piranha 3D (2010)

When all is said and done, one of the big entertainment headlines at the end of the year will undoubtedly be, "Piranha 3D scores 80% - and above - on Rotten Tomatoes." If you don't believe me, go ahead and look it up. I don't blame you, because the movie is as unmitigatedly terrible as it sounds.

It must come as some surprise that The Cinema King voluntarily sat through what must undoubtedly be one of the worst movies of this year; I'm still a little bit surprised myself that it happened. But, on the advice of a friend who had heretofore never been wrong about pop culture (a fan of Lost and one of the parties responsible for introducing me to Dexter), I plopped into a seat as the lights began to darken and readied myself for a movie that would prove all my suspicions unfounded.

As the lights came back up, I was still waiting for that movie. Because what I got was exactly what I expected - a B-movie (not to impugn the B-movies that originally initiated that descriptor) with a pitiable premise, predominantly poorly acted and largely without the tongue in cheek nature that would have been needed to pull off the picture. Sorry, buddy, you're now on my grain-of-salt list.

Piranha 3D almost defies the convention of a premise, because all you need to know is in the title - there are piranhas, and this movie is in 3D. The film takes place during spring break on geographically ambiguous Lake Victoria, where scores of party-prepared college students let loose their inhibitions and dive in for the time of their lives. But, as Horatio Caine famously noted of spring break, "It should have been the time of her life... *dons sunglasses* ...instead of the end of it." After devouring Richard Dreyfuss (present, it seems, as an oblique homage to the aquatic horror genre's granddaddy Jaws), the aforementioned piranhas set their fangs on the aforementioned college students, Sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) and her deputy (Ving Rhames), adult film producer Derrick Jones (Jerry O'Connell, who chews scenery like a human piranha), and Derrick's new albeit reluctant stars Jake (Steven R. McQueen) and Kelly (Jessica Szohr, who seems to be standing in for Vanessa Hudgens). Oh yeah, and Christopher Lloyd is in it as the resident piranha expert/exposition wholesaler.

The biggest problem with Piranha 3D is that there's just no life in it. On the surface, it all seems like a good idea, as though there's going to be some rip-roaring good satire at work, with riotously overdrawn characters in preposterous situations spouting off one-liners that will become part of the cultural lexicon. But instead what we get is something that claims to be that but carries itself off fairly straightforwardly, adhering religiously to all of the horror film tropes that it should be lampooning - first attack, innocuous setting, sexy teens vs. authority, last scare (in fact, this is played for laughs, but it's so overwrought that it's tantamount to when Joel McHale photoshops people getting hit by a bus on The Soup), &c. Though it's supposedly a comic horror film, there's little to laugh at in the first hour or so of the movie; O'Connell is so hammy you'll start to smell pork chops after a while, but it's so overblown that all I could muster was a dismissive eye-roll at how hard he was trying.

It's not until the last twenty minutes or so (I know, because I checked my watch periodically - something I never do during movies I even close to enjoy... something I didn't even do during Nic Cage's The Wicker Man, my favorite bad movie) that Piranha 3D starts to have fun with itself, introducing wildly fantastic Robert Rodriguez-style sequences that are so over-the-top that the film should have been littered with them. For example, Ving Rhames at one delightfully giddy moment, tears the motor off a boat and uses the propeller as a chainsaw to fend off encroaching piranhas (piranhi? piranhae?); had the movie been comprised of more scenes like that - and had Adam Scott been given more lines as the geologist with a sardonic wit - the movie might have been more of a success. But no, instead we get two minutes of naked water ballet, a moment whose only function in the film seems to be to inspire word of mouth: "Hey, let's go see Piranha 3D." "I don't know; I heard it was bad." "Who cares, dude? Naked water ballet!" "I am so there!"

That's another chief complaint about Piranha 3D - the nudity. I should have known going into it that this was a movie that wasn't going to hold back, but I was expecting the go-for-broke attitude to come from a degree of satire. Not so; the film is apparently governed by the mentality that, if your film is starting to sink, just throw some skin up on the screen. Now, it's a spring break movie, and I get that it would have probably earned the filmmakers some critical ire if they did a spring break movie that didn't include at least a bit of gratuitous nudity (the old standby of the horror genre, after all), but it's just so exorbitant here. I don't want to come off as some sort of puritanical nut, because that's not it at all; it's just that the film uses nudity as a crutch, and it comes off as excessive, exorbitant, distracting, and desperate. Where nudity has been used as a deceptive counterpoint to violence/horror to come or as a way to elicit a cheap laugh, Piranha 3D seems to have taken its storyboards, thrown darts at them, and inserted a naked person wherever said darts landed.

There are other offenses at stake here, too - Christopher Lloyd is criminally mis- and under-used here; I haven't seen him in a very long time, but it's a shame that he's here instead of somewhere where his talents would be well-served. Moments of peril are very predictable, such that it's very easy to identify which of the four characters on screen will be eaten, and in which order. And the gore is used so heavily and with so little moral compass that some of the aftermath scenes play out more like Schindler's List than Shaun of the Dead. But the greatest sin that Piranha 3D commits is that it's not fun enough to justify the upcharge for 3D glasses. Indeed, the 3D effects aren't all that great, either. There's one moment where a character throws up directly into the camera that at least gets that visceral reaction, but most of the 3D effects rely on recycled gags from old Dr. Tongue bits from SCTV (the difference being that Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Beef had punchlines and class). Piranha 3D marks the first time that I've really noticed a murky and unpolished look to movies that have been converted to 3D - a problem I've never encountered with, say, Disney's 3D effects. Perhaps it's just that, like everything else about this movie, the effects aren't very good at all. In fact, they downright bite (sorry).

For the first time since I don't remember when (possibly ever), I was inspired to ask for my money back as the credits rolled on Piranha 3D. But it soon occurred to me that all I would get would be a blank stare, a blink or two, and the response, "Look, you volunteered to see a movie entitled Piranha 3D. What'd you expect, Shakespeare?" I also chickened out because I realized I would have to admit to another living soul that I shelled out money to see this movie. Oh, wait.
Piranha 3D is rated R "for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use." This is probably the least appropriate theatrical release this year, with many graphic feeding scenes in which the piranhas chomp away pieces of people until all that is left are bloody skeletons. There's toplessness and rear nudity galore, F-bombs a-plenty, and enough alcohol and cocaine to make Ozzy Osbourne look up. Even though there are kids in the movie (added, doubtless, as an attempt to build suspense even though we know kids are invincible in horror movies), leave yours at home.