8-26-10 Movie Review: Piranha 3-D

Only two noncommercials coming up over the next few days, one tomorrow and one Tuesday. Friday at 7, the Scottish Rite Theatre, 332 East First, with dinner preceding at 6, will show the funniest train movie ever made, Buster Keaton’s silent The General, with Buster stealing a train in the cause of the Civil War and running a mad race with his pursuers that includes as many sight gags as you will find in any movie on earth. That’s 6 for dinner, 7 for The General, Friday in the Scottish Rite Theatre at 332 East First. And Tuesday, at 6:30, the League of Women Voters will show Judge Karen Humphreys’ DVD “Safeguarding U.S. Democracy: A Quest for a More Diverse Judiciary,” from last March’s History Day Celebration, in the Downtown Senior Center, 200 South Walnut, one block south of Douglas and one east of Seneca; go to the parking lot entrance, 6:30 Tuesday.

Or you could enjoy a totally purposeless and artless guilty pleasure with Piranha in 3-D.

Piranha in 3-D is not a takeoff or anything original; it’s a direct mockup of those beloved old cheapies that used to show in drive-in double features twenty years before Jaws made monster movies, if not respectable, at least single-feature fare. It doesn’t have a phony moral message in having teenagers sneak off to covert place to have sex and get devoured by radiated monsters; it doesn’t pretend to any moral message at all. When it isn’t indulging in gratuitous gore, it most closely resembles one of those old Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach movies, with screenfuls of gyrating female legs and bodies but surprisingly little even implying actual sex; there is a certain amount of nudity, but the men generally just stand around and cheer and act preadolescent.

It’s sad to see a star like Elizabeth Shue – Oscar-nominated for Leaving Las Vegas and female lead of the original Karate Kid – reduced to this kind of pablum, but pay is pay and at least she isn’t required to remove her sheriff’s uniform and is allowed to order some people around. Nobody else is worth special mention except whoever plays the porn-movie director, who is the most tiresome supposedly comic character since Diane Keaton in Because I Said So. I have been assured that multitudes of prehistoric piranhas could, in fact, survive for millions of years in an underground lake, though they would almost certainly turn blind in two million years. And the ground fissure that finally releases them into the spring-break resort lake is just a natural disaster; we are spared the old-style atomic accidents that fueled the drive-ins for a decade or so. And except for when Shue dives into the water and seconds later is bone dry, I didn’t notice any obvious technical errors, though it is a mistake to 3-dimensionalize shots that were fuzzy and too fast-moving in 2-D to start with.

Otherwise, the only likely objections to Piranha in 3-D might be that there is no individual monster to identify with, just a mass of fish; or that you don’t want things vomited into your lap or bodies that pull in two during rescue attempts or great gaping holes in the bodies of live people. But if you weren’t looking for stuff like that, would you go to a movie called Piranha in 3-D at all? Well, I did meet a guy who went to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work thinking it was about Phyllis Diller.