Piranha 3D Review: It's More Like Piranha 3 Double D's

With Piranha 3D, director Alexandre Aja has taken a break from the gruesome serious horror of High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes and instead made a horror film that is a self-deprecating, fun time.

An underwater tremor cracks open the bottom of Lake Victoria, unleashing scores upon scores of prehistoric, blood-crazed piranha onto the unwitting co-eds that have arrived to celebrate spring break. Sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) is tasked with protecting everyone in the lake from the piranha while her son, Jake (Steven R. McQueen), runs off to play tour guide for a film crew shooting a porn.

That’s pretty much all the set up that’s needed for this movie. Basically, people go in the water and piranhas are in the water. And the piranhas like to eat people.

The movie opens with a great scene that would seemingly set up the pace and tone of the film but is actually misleading. After the opening kill sequence there is a solid twenty to thirty minutes of waiting. It is almost as if Aja wanted to set up all the characters before the piranha killing spree began. This would be great if all the characters weren’t shallow stock clichés. To be clear here, my complaint isn’t the shallowness of the characters but that too much time passes between piranha kill scenes.

However, Aja definitely makes up for it with a brilliant fifteen to twenty minute long sequence of complete slaughter during a wet t-shirt contest. This sequence is wonderfully designed because Aja actually comes up with things for people to do. It isn’t just cut to death, cut to death, cut to death. Instead, the people try all kinds of ways to get away from the piranha and these plans backfire in horrific, gorey ways.

Unfortunately, the climax is not nearly as satisfying. The action in the final sequence is good, but it lacks the inventiveness of the wet t-shirt slaughter, and so it feels less satisfying. Also, at the end of the sequence it feels as if the film is setting itself up for several more scenes and then abruptly ends. It’s almost as if Aja ran out of money and had to just end the movie.

I feel that I should address the 3D in the movie as it is part of the title. The 3D is okay. It is not as bad as other post-conversions…most of the time. Several times, parts of scenes would be completely out of focus and unwatchable. Also, a lot of the underwater footage of the piranhas attacking is completely incomprehensible. It is just a lot of out of focus motion and red water. However, Aja does deliver boobs in 3D. And a lot of them. So there is that.

This is the kind of movie for people who wondered what Dr. Emmett Brown would be like in a horror flick, which is exactly the role Christopher Lloyd plays as the fish expert. This is the kind of movie that will put a bikini-clad college girl in the water and let her hair get caught in the propeller of a boat. Then it will let that motor start and tear all the skin off that girl’s face. This is the kind of movie that lets two female porn stars swim naked underwater and make out. For nearly five minutes.

What is Piranha 3D? It is completely shallow, horrific, bloody fun.