Piranha

(2010)

Dir: Alexandra Aia

What is so likeable about Piranha is its awareness. Alexandra Aja’s picture is a chance to see beautiful but annoying, scantily clad youngsters get torn to shreds as graphically as possible by hundreds of titular fish. And that’s all it proclaims to be. Any film in which a horny pornographer’s penis is bitten off and munched on before our very eyes is about as unpretentious as you can get.

The plot is simple and light: it’s Spring Break. There’s a lake. There’s piranhas. I wonder what could happen…

The violence is never disturbing, always tinged with comedy in the distant vain of the Romero horror flicks of old or even Joe Dante’s - who directed the 1978 original - Gremlins. Yes, it still deals in clichés. The young, romantically stunted boy is trying to impress the attractive local girl and winds up getting them both in trouble. There are ‘cute’, smartarse kids. And, of course, there’s Ving fucking Rhames being a badass motherfucker with a boat propeller. But it all just feels like one big joke that we’re all in on. The filmmakers are inviting us to a big, silly party where we don’t have to think, don’t have to pretend to be seeing something we’re not; just sit back and enjoy as a naked Kelly Brook swims by in one scene, and in another as a hang gliding teen is chewed in half.

The 3-D element feels like part of the gag, just something extra to make these cartoonish deaths even more so. It obviously isn’t great, or even as good as Dante’s original, but just feels so laidback and easy that it’s impossible not to enjoy. We can enjoy intellectual pieces of cinema fine and dandy, but what kind of boring bastards would we be if we couldn’t enjoy some blood, guts, fish, tits and Christopher Lloyd every so often?

*** ¼ / *****

“We’re gonna need a bigger penis.”