ESSAY: I Ramble About Piranhas, 3-D, Frenchmen, and Gore

This marks the fourth time this week I’ve sat down with the intention of addressing Piranha 3-D, the multidimensional spectacular that offers viewers the pleasure of watching a fish puke up Jerry O’Connell’s penis.  It’s a genuine pleasure, truly.  As are many moments in the film, some relating to the gore, but most to the actors wise enough to oversell this material.  I’m thinking especially of O’Connell, Ving Rhames, and Christopher Lloyd, who provides vital information with such volatile bluster that it’s remarkable he doesn’t require hospitalization.

That’s not to disparage the sturdy contributions from Elisabeth Shue and Adam Scott, who don’t wear out their welcome as the sobering leads, mostly because of their pluck, but also because Piranha 3-D stays under ninety minutes, which is vital when you’re a movie called Piranha 3-D.  Aja does his job mostly right, producing a zippy creature-feature that tries to both honor and kid its inspirations.  Richard Dreyfuss gets a cute opener as an ill-fated boater named Matt, but his demise emphasizes speed and carnage instead of suspense.  Message received: this film is not Jaws.

I like to think they're watching Party Down.

Unfortunately, Piranha 3-D is also not an even film, which hurt my earlier efforts to write a more unified review.  No matter the mood, no matter my approach, I kept lapsing into discordant asides.  “This works.”  “This part was stupid.”  “Was Paul Scheer’s death lost in the editing room?”  Stray observations for a film full of stray events.  Fast as it is, the film is sloppy and unfocused.  Easy example: Shue’s steadfast policewoman vies for main character status with Jerry O’Connell’s sleazeball producer and Steven R. McQueen’s Jake, the teenager chasing his unrequited crush.  Who’s our hero?  However, there’s a more complicated example here that aggravates me.  There’s too much gore.

Specifically, there’s too much gore, and it does not work with this subject.  The film’s non-piranha scenes suggest lighter fare, like Tremors and Gremlins, with the colorful townsfolk confronting an invasion of chittering beasts.  Piranha 3-D even thieves its police-mom/frustrated-child dynamic from the underrated Eight Legged Freaks – another film that incongruously gave ferocious animals light-hearted chirping sounds.  Of course, that worked with Freaks’s cartoon attitude, where the spiders did double-takes and the deaths were bloodless.

No joke - this may be his best work ever.

Here, Aja angles for the dread of inevitable carnage, rather than the suspense of threat and escape.  One sequence has a woman (topless, natch) parasailing, legs dipping in and out of the water.  It isn’t enough to see the water bubble and hear her scream.  It is imperative that she rise back up, breasts flopping, body nearly shorn at the waist, blood streaming down.  Another sequence has a broken wire slice a woman in half.  The emphasis stays on the gore, and, again, it’s not enough to see her top half slide off.  We must see also it fall through the lake’s water, blood billowing into the murk.  Piranha!

To be fair, I thought some of the gore was clever, and some of the deaths felt righteous (O’Connell’s especially), but then we get hit by a scene where children watch a nearby woman fall slowly into the lake, pulled by her hair, becoming chum for a feeding frenzy.  Aja likely understands the disconnect, which is why he tries to ignore it and power through the scene.  Compare these scenes to the early films of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, who balanced their horror-coms by amping the gore to the point of surreality.  That might’ve made this film cohesive and impressive.  Aja loves his gore effects too much, to the point that horror makeup guru Greg Nicotero cameos as a survivor helping people out of the lake.

In a nod to the eighties, sexual liberation equates to violent death.

Much of the method here reminds me of Aja’s background as a horror director from the so-called New French Extremity.  This loose “movement” includes boundary-breaking pictures like Martyrs, Frontieres, Inside, and Aja’s own High Tension.  The films couch themselves in unheard-of sights and visions of body horror, from live flaying to skin melting to Aja, in Tension, reducing a man’s head to pulp, using only a stairway and a bookcase (the lesson: don’t buy books).  Some of these films have the substance to support the envelop-pushery.  Martyrs and Trouble Every Day have especially compelling undercurrents.

Piranha 3-D doesn’t, conflating its breasts, boobs, and boneheads into an energetic mishmash of goals and interests.  Yeah, it’s energetic.  It’s fascinating in its Jekyll/Hyde personality.  It'll make horror fans think a bit about the nature of gore, its pros and cons.  The flick's worth seeing...but I would never call it successful.

Especially not the 3-D.  The in-your-face cheapness (self-aware, to be sure) was obvious and trite and flat and it gave me a headache.  I’ve actively disliked the current 3-D fad, with the inflated prices and the failure to elicit any sensation greater than “Ooh, look at the depth!”  Even so, Cameron’s Avatar never gave me a headache, which occurred during Piranha 3-D, to the point that I frequently took-off the glasses, mid-frenzy, and closed my eyes.  I don’t think I missed much – I could hear the screams and chirps just fine.

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