PIRANHA - A remake with plenty of bite

Oh, what a dilemma I had. I love Roger Corman flicks, I love horrible B-Movies, but I hate remakes - Hollywood seems unable to leave anything alone, recycling and regurgitating the past after totally sucking the soul out of it. But last summer, I found myself at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater, which was running the remake Piranha - how could I pass up a chance to watch schlock at one of the most famous movie houses in the world?

So me and my 75 year old mother (who loves these movies as much as I do, god bless her totally awesome heart) I ponyed up my 18 bucks, grabbed my popcorn and checked my brain at the door. While I still got the headache from that damned 3D effect, I was pleasantly surprised by the actual quality of the film. So when I found the DVD at my local mom-n-pop video store for 5 bucks, I could hardly pass it up!

Right off the bat, you know that Piranha respects its roots. We open with an old man in a rowboat, all alone in the vast wilderness and fishing on an isolated lake. Since this is the Curtain Puller Monster Attack, you know that this cant end well - but the kicker? It's Richard Dreyfuss, singing "Show me the way to go home" and drinking Amity Beer. Now THATS class! Anyway, there's underwater earthquake, the lakebed splits wide open, and thousands and thousands of tiny eating machines swarm out of the yawning abyss. Poor ol' Matt Hooper is devoured within seconds and the prehistoric piranha swarm throughout the lake.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Lake Victoria, Spring Break has descended upon the sleepy little town. Thousands of randy teens swarm the streets, the beaches and the waterways in a giant orgy of wet t-shirt contests and loud rock music. Town Sherriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue, still looking hawt 25 years later) and Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames, fulfilling our Doomed Black Man roll quota for the movie) are the overworked authority figures who have to keep a handle on this wild party. Meanwhile, teenage youngster and social outcast Jake Forester (decendant of Steven McQueen - who isn’t nearly as talented as his Grandpappy) has been shanghaied by Sherriff Mom to keep an eye on his younger siblings (who are charmingly played by Sage Ryan and Brooklyn Proulx).

But Jake gets a better offer from sleazy video producer Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell, who apparently managed to slide into Bad Movie World), who is shooting the most recent installment of the “Wild, Wild, Girls” video series. Derrick needs a local to take him to all the best hot-spots on the lake. So Jake and his not-exactly girlfriend Kelly (Played by the blindingly hawt Jessica Szohr) hop aboard the Love Boat for some up close and person water sports. Lil Bother and Sister get stranded on an island, the Love Boat gets stuck in the middle of the lake, Sherriff Mom does her best to close the beaches and ten thousand little eating machines are heading right for the most happening hot-spots on Lake Victoria for a little dining out. . . .

Let me be completely upfront here. Piranha does EXACTLY what is says on the tin: a retro horror movie throwback with plenty of young and nubile tits, bad acting, cheesy writing, and sprays of kayo syrup and red food coloring. If you are one of those movie snobs that demands a solid scripting or intelligent dialogue, you might as well move onto another review - there are no such things for you here.

That said, Piranha is actually a pretty fun movie - note that I didn’t say GOOD movie, but fun. It's respectful of the original Joe Dante flick yet manages to make its own stamp on the proceedings. Director Alexandre Aja (the man behind High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes) clearly has a love of the old movie - while he mostly used CGI fish instead of puppets like they did in 1978, Aja opted to use as much practical effects work as he possibly could. CGI is sexy, but using amputees for stuntmen and having a well rounded make-up team makes the film much stronger. The beach party massacre where several hundred nubile and hunk teens are swiftly nibbled to death is one of the best, most visceral, batshit frantic scenes I've witnessed in a very, very long time.

I said the acting was crap - that's not entirely true. Aside from the Dreyfuss cameo, we get a bit part from Christopher Lloyd doing is best Doc Brown as the town resident fish expert. The best part (kids and cameos aside) has to be Jerry O'Connell. His hedonistic, womanizing, drug-using scumbag gets all the best lines ("My . . . penis! They ate my penis!"), totally hams it up and generally has a great time with a completely sleazy roll. Brilliant! Now granted, the script isn’t exactly a very demanding mistress, but the film would have suffered if the Old Guard thespians didn’t play it to the hilt.

Despite Roger Corman apparently not having anything to do with the remake (aside, probably, from receiving a huge check for the rights), Aja embraces the Corman ethic - interspersed with the lovely flow of red, we get plenty, and I mean PLEANTY of tits and ass to go around. Seriously, we get some full frontal swimming bits that I swear would have sent the MPAA censors into a tizzy.

It's not a perfect movie, mind you. After the amazingly frantic Beach Carnage scene, the movie moves on to its climax - but the energy to carry the action isn’t there. With Kelly trapped inside a sinking Love Boat, Sherriff Mom and the oceanography expert on site to investigate the earthquake throw a rope over to the doomed vessel, before crawling over, talking about the dilemma WAAAAY too much and then sending everyone back to the speedboat all at once. While there's plenty of Piranha Chomping to go around (Including O'Connell's last hilarious words), there's no sense of tension like at the end of Jaws and the "Smile you sunuvabitch" moment. Its okay I guess - but based on what had come before, it should have really grabbed my balls and twisted!

And a couple of minor points both good and bad. I'm kind of shocked that they didn’t play the Authority Figure Insisting on Keeping the Beaches Open Because The Regatta is The Life Blood of the Town card. There's one token mention on how the spring break dollars keep the town alive during the off season, but there's no Mayor Vaughn to hammer the point home. Bravo for not following the Jaws connect-the-dots to the letter! On the other side of the coin- where the hell did Local Jerk Rival Love Interest go? The script seemed to be setting him up as a supreme jerk that gets his comeuppance at the feeding frenzy, but he just falls off the map 3/4th into the movie. It can be safely assumed he was eaten by the piranha but it's weird we never see his fate, considering all the other victims on that same boat get very graphic and obvious deaths.

At the end of the day, what you take away from Piranha will depend on how much you like these type of movies. If dark comedic horror isn’t your bag, Piranha won't convince you. However if you grock the drive-in B-Movie vibe, Piranha will rock. It's pure schlock, completely camp, and utterly trashy. It's a flick that knows it's cheesy, ridiculous, and pretty much there so we can see scantily clad teenagers get killed in horrible and bloody ways - and revels in that fact. It doesn't pretend to be something that it's not, focusing on doing what it does in as fun a way as possible.

Roger Corman would have loved it.

THE DVD -
Right out of the gate, Piranha is a vast improvement from the theatrical experience. They ditched that crappy, horrible headache inducing 3D effect - a huge plus - and pumped up the color palate. The underwater shots are murky, but that's probably on purpose. Otherwise, the skin tones (and there is a LOT of skin) are amazing, the sky is nice and blue, the blood is a solid red that doesn’t bleed (color, I mean) and the blacks are solid - this thing really looks good. Meanwhile the dolby digital 5.1 surround sound has a good balance. The music and effects don't overpower the dialogue.

THE EXTRAS -
Shockingly, we get a five part documentary, with each section running about 20 minuets, give or take. Yes, the behind-the-scenes documentary runs longer than the actual movie that it's documenting! It covers the cast and the story, the location, putting together the spring break sequences, the blood and gore effects and the CGI special effects. While it drags a bit here and there, this thing is really amazingly comprehensive!

Following that behemoth, we get an audio commentary from writer/director/producer
Alexandre Aja along with producers Gregory Lavasseur Alix Taylor. It's a tough commentary at first, since the accents can get thick at times, but once you get used to their way of talking, it's actually really informative. They, like me, were shocked that the full-on nudity of the underwater scenes made it past the MPAA without any cuts. They were also pissed at how the trailer totally spoiled the end of the movie - true.

Oh, speaking of trailers - where the hell is the Piranha trailer? We get a passel of the latest shit to come out of Hollywood: the crappy 4th Resident Evil flick, Game of Death (not the really awesome Bruce Lee one, but a really crappy generic Hollywood action flick), Sniper: Reloaded (another generic looking action flick. When Billy Zane is your biggest named star, your movie is in trouble!), Ticking Clock, and some lame flick about a guy named Matt losing his virginity on youtube (Christ, take me now!) that I couldn’t be bothered to sit all the way through. So we get ALL that, but no Piranha trailer? Where is the justice in the world?

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Let us be absolutely, perfectly clear on this matter: Piranha is a horrible, dreadful, movie. However it is, hands down, the BEST horrible, dreadful, movie to come along in a very long while.