Review: I see the 'Piranha' but where is the 3D?

Courtesy of Dimension Films

Piranha 3D delivers exactly what a film about prehistoric piranha set loose on Spring Breakers should deliver, and the biggest flaw of this film is how it seems to set out to appeal to a very small demographic of film-goers - specifically, people who watch movies purely for sex and violence.

Oh sure, everyone watches film and television for the sex and violence; prime time crime dramas, "reality" TV, feature films, they all luxuriate in sex and violence on a regular basis, and the masses eat that crap up every day. But with Piranha 3D, the sex and violence is on the forefront and explicit, and in some ways it serves as a condemnation of our society's open lust for such forbidden fruits (as well as a condemnation of Spring Break culture), but it is all so base and schlocky that it is hard to state that Piranha 3D is really anything but an excuse for copious amounts of fake blood and fake boobs.

I'm not going to review or recap the plot because, suffice to say, their ain't one. Prehistoric piranha are set loose in a lake, right around when it becomes a safe haven for underage drinking and sex, with Elisabeth Shue (Back to the Future II) as the town sheriff keeping a watch on things. There is a solid hour of Spring Break partying on film, along with lots of the most gratuitous of nudity, that it would almost be considered pornographic if it wasn't also all so true. The 16-24 year olds (yes, the under agers are sneaking in there, parents, so don't kid yourselves) that regularly turn out to these spring break destinations all spend five to seven days completely losing their minds, only to go back to their more puritanical lifestyles back home where they came from. And in this day and age, those "lost weekends" come back to haunt in the form of Girls Gone Wild videos, and in Piranha 3D, there is a Wild Wild Girls series that preys on these simple minded pieces of flesh. The Wild Wild Girls founder happens to be played by Jerry O'Connell (Mission to Mars), and I don't know if I ever enjoyed him more in anything, he went nuts with the character and it's fun to watch him be a total douche.

The piranha stuff is a big mix of great and awful attributes. Many of the kills and gore shots are inventive and ridiculous, but this should be expected from the director of Haute Tension and The Hills Have Eyes. Since these are piranha, they often don't outright kill their victims as much as maim them horribly, and there are a lot of people with chunks of meat missing from their bare torsos, or with hands and feet chewed down to their skeletons. The mega classy French director Alexandre Aja even shows us a set of breasts implants floating up to the surface - I won't tell you what comes floating down past it. But for all the great physical make up effects and on-set magic, each and every single piranha is CG and they all look incredibly fake and horrible. They have a great design, but never once at any point in the movie do they look real and that really kills the horror. It looks like they didn't have much money to make this movie with, and the CG really kills it all. There are great moments balanced with awful post-production work, and it all combines for a mediocre film at best.

The 3D, by the way, is absolutely dreadful, and it is the main reason I would tell people to just skip this altogether. This movie was shot in the normal 2D process, and they did a 3D post conversion that was supposed to make everything pop out. But 95% of the movie felt flat - there were plenty of things floating in the front of the frame or people poking stuff at the camera, but none of it popped out in the way 3D should. Throw on top of that the fact that there are no 2D versions of this movie in theaters, and you officially have a film that is being held hostage. You want to see this movie? Then you need to pay the extra cash to get the glasses that will let you actually see the movie, because the only function of those polarized glasses are to bring the images back into focus. This obvious deficiency of 3D is made worse by the fact that a couple of trailers are shown in 3D, including Tron Legacy, and that 3D popped and looked great, which was then followed swiftly by the flat looking Piranha 3D. It's a crying shame, and further proof that post-conversion 3D is a total rip off.

Still, the great Christopher Lloyd pops up in one scene as Mr. Exposition, and explains what kind of fish these beasties are, and Lloyd is perfect in this role, totally selling the zaniness of the set up and the movie. He should have been made a main character, because he really brought a lot of life on to the screen when he appeared. And semi-retired Richard Dreyfuss seems to have been paid a lot of money to dress up in his old Hooper outfit from Jaws and essentially do nothing but sit in a boat, but hey, it was fun to see, right? Ving Rhames and Adam Scott are both criminally underused - as a matter of fact, the movie feels very truncated and shortened, like big swaths of characters and story lines were excised. Maybe those extra character bits and stories would have made for a more fulfilling experience. But instead, Piranha 3D sits in a netherworld betwixt satire and horror, with plenty of condescending comedy thrown in to keep things humorous at a detached and emotionless distance. Boobs and gore, what else do you want? Good 3D, too? Man you're picky. Just know what you're getting, is all I'm saying.

The Trailer Rundown:

Jackass 3D - I don't know why they didn't show this trailer in 3D but they didn't. It still looks hilarious though. I'm looking forward to it, 3D or not.

Saw 3D - again, why not show the trailer in 3D? Weird. I have no interest in the Saw series, and 3D won't get me in to see this one, but I'm sure it'll bring back some of the fans that have fallen off after the last few films (can't beat those laws of diminishing returns).

Harry Potter - the best part is when the trailer says "Presented in Two Parts." I love this money-grabbing technique of splitting a final book of a series into multiple films. Absolute genius. Pad these things out and make them as epic and dense as possible. It's all fan service anyway, at this point. The Harry Potter fanbase is so large that they never needed to cater outside of it for this series to be the mega success it is. Add the decent 3D bump to the overall gross and there will be some very happy people.

Resident Evil: Afterlife - they actually showed this hunk of Hell in 3D and it looks awful. And its funny when the trailer says "with the most advanced 3D technology," and then follows it with crappy looking 3D. At least it looked better than Piranha 3D ended up looking. But still...blegh.

Tron Legacy - this movie looks crazy. They showed this trailer in 3D and it looked incredible, like Avatar levels of incredible 3D. This is going to be the big movie to end the year and hopefully people will get excited for it because it looks nuts.