Film Review: Ridiculous ‘Piranha 3D’ Attempts Record For 3D Gore

CHICAGO – With a record-setting approach to bare breasts and bloodied bodies, Alexandre Aja’s “Piranha 3D” is a ridiculous gore-fest that falls completely flat in terms of character, dialogue, and logic but pops off the screen in the areas in which it really counts for a movie about prehistoric man-eating fish. It’s far-from-perfect and could have been with a few tweaks but “Piranha 3D” is off-the-rails crazy in all the ways that someone buying a ticket to a three-dimensional gore-o-rama wants what’s presented to them to be off-the-rails crazy.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

Working from a tongue-in-bloody-cheek script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, Aja opens his remake with a nod to “Jaws” as Richard Dreyfuss drinks and sings while he fishes for bass. After a minor earthquake opens a rift in the lake beneath him, poor Dick captures something much bigger than your average catch and ends up a bloody mess. It turns out that there has been a subterranean lake buried under the Earth for a couple million years and the maniacal creatures that have lived down there have gone a little stir crazy. Just in time for Spring Break.

Read Brian Tallerico’s full review of “Piranha 3D” in our reviews section. [15]

For the next hour or so, “Piranha 3D” is mostly boob-filled set-up as drunken, bikini-clad party-goers have no idea what’s about to hit them. Some will be turned off by the dozens of shots of swimming fish (often from piranha P.O.V., something that I’m not sure has ever happened in a film before) and wish that the movie would “get to the good stuff” but Aja is merely counting down until the insanity begins. And I mean insanity.

What most people will remember about “Piranha 3D” is a roughly fifteen-minute centerpiece in the final act that will send gorehounds to Amazon to pre-order their copy of the film. With the same kind of goreful glee as “Dead-Alive,” you can practically hear Aja giggling like a mad scientist as he unleashes total chaos on literally dozens of victims. Only a few of the many “joys” of this simply insane climax include a controversial horror director’s head being lopped off by a motorboat, a cheesy actor being torn in half, a girl being scalped by a propeller blade, and literally dozens of starlets being ripped into pieces. It’s nuts. And I mean that in a good way.

Continue reading for Brian Tallerico’s full “Piranha 3D” review. [15]

Piranha 3D
Photo credit: Gene Page/Dimension Films