Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

At ease, fresh fish!

First, let me say that I was appalled by last weekend’s weak show of solidarity and support for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World! You’re spending  your time and money on what, Vampire’s Suck ?! Really??! You’ve made some bad decisions, maggot…real bad. Get with the program, mount up, and sit your butts down in the theater!

Now, onto business. This past weekend, we were given a hearty dose of blood, gore, and frightful waters in Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D, a semi-reboot, semi-sequel to the popular Joe Dante Cult film Piranha, from 1978. The original story (scripted by indie-darling John Sayles) told of a school of piranha’s let loose on a small town lake, and was meant as a B-style parody of JAWS. Roger Corman produced it — as only Corman would — and that film involved dozens of practical effects, from rubber fish tied to fishing lines to a simple hotel waitress standing in as a “boob double” for actress Heather Menzies.

Aja’s remake is brutal in many ways — overuse of CGI, terrible 3D conversion, gratuitous and plentiful nudity, hundreds of gallons of fake blood. And it’s also glorious — Christopher Lloyd doing a moderately watered down Doc Brown reincarnation, Richard Dreyfus in a classic and referential cameo, and Ving Rhames going medieval on killer fish. But even the water ballet by two naked women is hilarious only for a few seconds, then it just becomes a tedious distraction from, you know, the gore.

At the end of the day, after seeing Piranha 3D, I still could’ve walked right along the shores of the ocean and taken a dip, had I been off duty. The problem with this Piranha is that not enough is done to scare me. The script doesn’t have an underlying agenda, nor are any of the deaths filled with spine-tingling suspense. They’re all gruesome, the sort of way that the bloody kills of a Friday the 13th movie are gruesome — that is, without tension. With no tension comes no fear the minute you walk out of the theater.

There are a few “make-you-jump” moments — a bloody hand darting out of the water, a penis-less dude spurting his last bloody breath — but director Aja really needs to work out the meaning of “suspense” — odd, considering his breakout film was titled High Tension. Piranhas dash through dark waters and towards kicking feet at casual speeds. Most of the chomping that occurs in the first half of the film is of one person at a time. When the body count truly starts to climb, we’re left with mangled gore — body parts that become Spaghetti-o’s rather than recognizeable as humans. This effect was put to much better use in Peter Jackson’s early film Dead Alive. But Jackson had the foresight to frontload his movie’s setting in a bizarro-small town setting, and new how to play to the comedy. The actors in Piranha try to under or oversell their parts, and it’s sad that they weren’t given specific quirks that could’ve helped set the tone (something done to better effect in a movie like Scream).

Granted, we’re not talking high art here. We’re talking B-Movie schlock — get to the scares, character be damned! Then show me the schlock! Guts and gore and chomping CG fish will only take us to the edge of what your movie “wants to be”. You have to hand me the cheese on a silver platter. I don’t care about the teen kid’s high school crush, and I’m kind of sick of the whole sheriff’s department being full of tough folks who never made it out of the small town. Overkill is too narrow a concept to describe the level of gratuitous breasts in Piranha 3D — and this is coming from a man with more guts than Gianna Michaels’ breasts have surface area.

There’s been a lot of chatter that Piranha 3D is a movie that “knows what it is”, but it doesn’t. This isn’t a grindhouse flick, nor is it even an exploitation film, in the truest sense of the word. It’s a cheap imitation of B-grade horror, that fails to scare. However, I will admit that the amount of creative kills is quite remarkable in the scheme of things. As is the underwater lesbian ballet provided by Kelly Brooke and Riley Steele.

The unbalanced ratio of scares to gratuitousness displayed in Piranha got me thinking of another great scare picture, told with incredible skill and depth, yet still able to scare the bejeezus out of the audience — JAWS (The original mama piranha, if you will).

Now, before you sound off about the differences in these two movies’ intentions, and the (attempted) exploitation aspect of Piranha vs. the serious artistic merits of Jaws, let me remind you that I’m not saying one film is better than the other. Piranha 3D obviously offers up a large dose of gore and blood, along with sex and c-grade jokes — all aspects of a movie to enjoy with a dozen loaded partygoers on a Friday night.

JAWS, on the other hand, will make you think twice about going in the water, and yet also tosses us a bone — literally — or two in the gore department.

My main point here is that you cannot compare apples to kumquats without at least acknowledging the context of where you pick the fruit. I’ve seen people get angry — angryyyyy — when talking about which Dawn of the Dead is better, Romero’s brilliant original or Zach Snyder’s career-making remake five years ago. One was labored and offered up strong social commentary as well as gruesome scares, while the other was fast-paced, unrelenting in jump-scares, and just as disgusting — but also included inside jokes and throwbacks to the original. Piranha 3D does the same, in its’ cameo offerings and the mocking of Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francis via Jerry O’Connell.

I guess what it comes down to is that, however you play within the genre, know your part and play it to the fullest extreme. Piranha 3D is fun and brutally gruesome, but you’ve got to at least try the practical effects and utilize suspense. How hard is it to create suspense — real tension, I’m talking — when thousands of deadly piranha are swimming towards a whole lake full of drunk Spring Breakers?

Now get your asses back in the field and go see SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD!!!

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle