Movie Review: Pirahna 3D
Pirahna 3D may be a milestone in the history of film. I am not even joking. Imagine the movie you were hoping to see when you went to see Snakes on a Plane on opening night, but didn’t. Add in an extended nude lesbian underwater ballet, a real horror director, and Elisabeth Shue tasing fish until they explode. This is why 3D was invented. I am honestly not sure it is possible to make a more entertaining movie about fish eating drunk spring breakers.
Alexandre Aja is a French director who made High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes. When he took on a remake of a little known 70s Jaws rip-off, best remembered for kick-starting Joe Dante’s directing career, you might have thought his career was on the verge of a downturn. Instead, he brought an outsider’s sensibility to the spectacle of inebriated, scantily-clad spring breakers and wrote a movie where Richard Dreyfuss plays his character from Jaws (literally, his character’s name is Matt Hooper), Christopher Lloyd for all intents and purposes plays his character from Back to the Future, Jerry O’Connell plays a thinly-veiled version of the Girls Gone Wild guy, and Ving Rhames shoots firearms into the air. The result is that the sequel has already been green-lit.
Elisabeth Shue plays the closest thing this mess has to a main character, as the mama bear sheriff of the resort town of Lake Victoria. An earthquake in the opening scene opens a passage to “an underground lake beneath the lake,” which is full of huge killer CGI pirahna from “TWO MILLION YEARS AGO” (picture Christopher Lloyd going nuts and looking like he’s doing jazz hands). These are fish that are capable of swimming past the camera (two inches from your face, because this is 3D), and then swimming back and basically winking at you right before they eat a dude’s penis. That happens. Anyway, Shue sets out with a scientist inexplicably played by Adam Scott from Party Down to save the town from killer fish. They are not actually that successful.
Spoiler: the girl dies
They try to evacuate the lake. There are many 3D boobs. Ving Rhames says “this is a big economic week for our town.” The boat is sinking and there are pirahnas in the water. Then we get to what, in my opinion, is one of the greatest extended set pieces in the history of horror. I don’t think it’s too spoilery to say that it involves many partying college students, many, many pirahnas, and lots and lots of gore. I’m a big fan of movies that show me things I have never seen before and likely will never see again. There’s a lot of that in this movie, but the biggest such moment may be this sequence… well, that and the underwater lesbian 3D ballet (it’s actually called “underwater ballet sequence” in the credits).
The best way to see this film is in the theater, for a couple of reasons. First off, you probably do not have a huge 3D TV on which to truly appreciate the nuances presented here. And by “nuances” I mean “boobies.” And secondly, this is a movie that needs to be seen with a large crowd. I was fortunate enough to see the film behind a large group of middle-aged women who had no idea what they were getting into. I was treated to a chorus of “Oh Damn. Oh DAMN. OH MY GOD” with each escalating moment. If you’re a gorehound, you will enjoy this movie more than most horror flicks. If you faint at the site of blood, maybe not.
I have long since learned that I do not want the same things out my entertainment as a lot of critics. Plenty of folks gush over Mad Men and the films of Bergman, and I’m not going to deny they’re pretty good. But given the choice, I will take the complete insanity of this movie every darn time. I want zeppelins, zombies, vampire hate sex, mind control helmets, pigeons doing double takes as the gondola drives by, gigantic freakin’ space-ships, and killer fish eating the legs off of girls in bikinis. Alexandre Aja is here to assure me I can have all that and more. In 3D.
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