As a fan of "creature features", like "Alien", "Cloverfield", "Jaws" and "Deep Blue Sea", I was pretty much looking forward to "Piranha 3D".  I never saw the first two in the series (not even the directorial debut of James Cameron, the much vaunted "Piranha 2: The Spawning"), but I figured, this is a film about fish that eat you.  I doubted there would be a huge backstory to worry about.

 

So, what does this film have to offer?  Well, it's got a great cast.  The sheriff of the soon-to-be-enbattled town is played by Elisabeth Shue.  Her second in command is Ving Rhames.  And in the finest performance of the film, Jerry O'Connell is the sleazy director of "Girls Gone Wild" style softcore porn.  You really, REALLY want this guy to die.  You've got to have one character like that in a film like this.

 

It also has two excellent cameos.  The big speech explaining why and how this Spring Break destination spot is overrun by prehistoric South American fish (hee!) is delivered by Christopher Lloyd in full-on Doc Brown mode.  He's a hoot.  The smaller, but ultimately cooler cameo is brought to us by Richard Dreyfuss, pretty much playing his character from "Jaws".  It's not even subtle, the way they handle that.  I loved it.

 

What else is there to like in this film?  There is one laugh-out-loud hilarious underwater lesbian frolic, scored with opera and filmed beautifully.  The only problem is, as you watch these two lovely ladies swim, you're counting the minutes before their flesh is chewed from their bones.

 

Really, that's about all that I have to say positive about "Piranha 3D".  And now for the bad.  (And there's plenty of bad.) 

 

On a technical level, I could tell from the first frame that this was an annoying, after-market 3D-ization (ala "Clash of the Titans") that just looks bad.  Really, I need to do better research before I bother going to see these 3D films.  "Avatar" looked great.  The CG stuff looks great.  This, not so much.

 

The filmmakers, in an effort to make sure that there was as much skin as blood on the screen, staged a truly outrageous Spring Break celebration, with dozens of boats and hundreds of uniformly gorgeous teens.  I get that they want us to be excited by wet t-shirt contests and the occasional girl-girl kiss so that our blood is up when the attack comes, but this was too much.  There's real Spring Break, movie Spring Break, and whatever Bosch-esque dream this director had one night.

 

But, fine, you say, they overdo the partying, what about the gore?!  Any film about vicious, cow-stripping fish is going to have some gore.  How was the gore?  Personally, I think it was too much.  Much too much.  There were precious few characters who just got eaten and died.  There were dozens of shots of exposed, flesh-stripped bone on people who were still alive and screaming.  There were hundreds of shots of horrifying bites and wounds.  There were dismemberments, people ripped apart, cut in half, images that strained believability even as they triggered my gag reflex.  This wasn't like "Saving Private Ryan" and its Omaha Beach sequence, which was horrifying, but entirely real.  This was horrifying and entirely pointless.

 

After an extended sequence at the marina where about a million people get bitten (or worse) by piranha, the action shifts to the "heroes" of the film.  The sheriff's kids and the porn folks are all on the same boat (ick) and anyone who is nice and wholesome lives, and anyone who enjoys sex dies.  Considering how egregiously they up the ante on the gore, couldn't they have pushed the conventions of the genre just a skosh?  Guess not.

 

The shock at the end of the film, which was part comedy, and part setup for a sequel, could have been fun, but it was telegraphed in the trailer and the TV spots.  I couldn't believe it.  Could you imagine the trailer for "Citizen Kane" including a shot of Rosebud in the furnace?  Could you imagine the trailer for "The Empire Strikes Back" including Vader saying, "Luke, I am your father"?  It's not like "Piranha 3D" is anywhere near either of these films in quality, but when one of your few saving graces is a shocker of an ending, why let the marketers ruin it?  Come on!

 

I really can't recommend this film to anyone.  It's not fun enough to be a late night cult film, and it's not viceral enough to work on its horror merits.  It's simply a series of images that, if they appeal to you, I suggest you get some therapy.