Piranha

2010 ****

Holy crap! You really cannot ask a movie to deliver on its promises better than last year's remake of Piranha, directed by French crazy man Alexandre Aja.

What do we want? Boobs and gore! When do we want it? AAHAAHAAOHHHFUCKOHMYGODOHMYGOOOOOD!!!

If only the boobs were as realistic as the gore, ha ha.

Spring Break in Lake Victoria, Arizona is the hoppinest, boobiest party in town. The viewer is presented with the glossiest version of the Spring Break myth ever. I know, I know, Spring Break is not a myth. There really are towns beset by drunken underclad young people, I know. But not only does Piranha invite you to the party you'll never go to (I know I won't), it gives you the most idealized version of that party you've ever seen. It's like someone managed to wallpaper the outdoors itself, and the wallpaper is dancing girls in bikinis. There's an inescapable bass boom of club music, and not even a slightly overweight person to be seen anywhere. And best of all, you know at some point a shit-ton of these foos are getting eaten.

And isn't that what you want to see happen at the party you'll never go to, the party that makes you jealous even though it doesn't exist?

But wait, it gets even better: in the original Piranha, the fish were the result of military testing during the Viet Nam war, and the colonel sent to contain the piranhas botches it and covers it up. Social commentary, you dig? Also, just like Jaws, there are greedy resort owners who don't want to foul up their grand opening, and one of them is... the same colonel. Such hand-wringing on the part of these writers!

But in 2010, the prehistoric fish are reunited with the surface world because of an apolitical earthquake, and there aren't any greedy profiteers looking to inhibit public safety. The kids get eaten because they're a bunch of assholes. They keep partying as the cops tell them to get out of the water (I really thought the cops should've just displayed a corpse on a hook), and suddenly it's frenzy time.

Before it came out in theaters, JPX posted a good, long clip containing footage of the movie's main set piece, which is basically MTV's Spring Break Gets Eaten By Piranhas. Except it's the R-rated version so it's a wet T-shirt contest hosted by Eli Roth. I can't find the clip, but the violence is relentless and creative, and too unabashedly pure in motive to be called gratuitous. It's not all fish-violence either, there's a healthy helping of boat violence. One particular dickhead jock decides to flee the scene by jumping from a large boat to a much smaller boat (cough cough -- stupid!) and ploughs through a thick crowd of beleagured swimmers, until a girl's hair gets tangled in his propeller. It's sick. It's like this movie donned brass knuckles made of live piranhas and punched my brain right in the gore-zone.

The epic devouring scene starts at 55 minutes into the movie, and that might sound like a long wait except that you spend most of the intervening minutes looking at boobs.

I know I keep harping on this, but the portrayal of the party is just so damn absurd. Honestly it seemed like it would be a drag to actually be there, but to see the way these people act, it's like a stadium-sized meeting of Boobaholics Anonymous suddenly said a collective "fuck it" and went on a bender. I imagine the conversation would sound like "Boooobs! I love booobs!" "Yeah, man -- hey look at that girl's boobs!" "Her friend has awesome boobs, too!" "We have boobs!" "Yes we know, we can see your boobs! We were just talking about that!" "Well we should hope so! We are exerting a lot of effort to show our boobs to people!" And so on.

There are certainly a lot of bumps to get past. The fish are well-designed but distractingly CG, some of the performances don't make any sense, and you will be asked to shrug off a few incidents when the script is disrespectful to logic itself. (For instance there's a boat that's sinking, but they can't get close to it because it's jammed on some pointy rocks... which means it can't be sinking.) But honestly it just isn't that hard to let those things go and simply watch. Piranha is yucky stuff, and a guaranteed good time