I remember the ad campaign for this one very well -- they touted the fact that the movie was in 3D and that it featured women in bikinis.
Unfortunately, watching it at home, I was not able to enjoy the 3D aspect, although it was often painfully obvious when I was SUPPOSED to be enjoying it. In movies like these, people are always shoving stuff into the camera -- oars, spilled drinks, vomit, you name it, it gets shoved towards the camera.
However, there were plenty of women in bikinis. PIRANHA takes place in a small lakeside town during Spring Break, as the town is overrun with high school and college aged kids ready to party. I was a little unclear on this but I guess early on there is an earthquake that opens a hole in the bottom of the lake leading to ANOTHER lake, and this is where the piranhas come from. They immediately kill Richard Dreyfuss, who is dressed as his character from JAWS and singing "Show me the way to go home."
Get it? Because JAWS was a popular movie about a killer fish.
Anyway, no more Richard Dreyfuss. So, that's disappointing. Instead we get a teenage kid (Steven R. McQueen) whose mom (Elizabeth Shue) is the local sheriff. He's supposed to babysit his younger siblings instead of joining in the Spring Break festivities, but decides to abandon them and go join a Girls Gone Wild type of crew on their boat, led by Jerry O'Connell in super douche mode. There's also a love interest (Jessica Szohr) who comes along, but they both keep swearing they're not together.
When bodies start surfacing from piranha attacks, a team of seismologists show up to check out the earthquake damage, led by Adam Scott, who takes a liking to Elisabeth Shue when she agrees to guide them around the lake.
One thing leads to another and eventually we have a giant blood bath on our hands. I didn't time it, but I'd guess there's maybe about a 30 minute scene in the middle of this film in which Spring Break kids get mauled by piranhas, one after the other. The gore effects are pretty gross, but look pretty cool, while the fish look like shitty CGI from the late 90s. So, that's another disappointment.
There's a creepy under current in this flick having to do with the dismemberment of girls in bikinis. I'm not sure who decided it was fun to watch girls in bikinis get eaten alive, but this movie really REALLY relishes in that kind of stuff. Characters are constantly referring to the girls as "bitches" and "whores" and the camera lingers on each swim suit death scene as if we're supposed to be glad these people are dying. Meanwhile, they didn't do anything wrong, except party in bikinis. What gives? It's like, misogyny, or something.
This flick is kind of a bummer because it seems like they really wanted to make a "fun", balls to the wall movie without reservations, and instead they ended up making a grim, tasteless one. The cast is good, including Ving Rhames, who I neglected to mention before, as a deputy who takes an outboard motor off of a boat and attempts to kill the piranhas with it. Then he gets eaten.
I feel like PIRANHA somehow has some kind of chip on its shoulder -- the glee it takes in killing all these people is just a little too transparent. If you want to make a movie that says, "Fuck it!" you can't have baggage.
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