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Everything’s excessive in the rowdy Piranha remake, now available on DVD
What we’ve got here is a 32-yearslater remake of a drive-in clone to a 1975 bona fide cinema thriller, so you might be inclined to believe that the law of diminishing returns is in full effect here. Yet last summer’s three-dimensional redo of Piranha (Dimension/Weinstein; 88 minutes; R; widescreen; 2010), which is now out in a DVD release, is a lively yet mixed bag of tricks from France’s Alexandre Aja, the horrormeister who first gained global notice with the gruesome psycho thriller High Tension (released stateside in 2005) and then followed up with Aja’s grisly 2006 revision of Wes Craven’s taut thriller The Hills Have Eyes.
The Piranha reboot adheres pretty close to the template established by director Joe Dante’s spirited 1978 original, itself an inspired Jaws rip-off. Within a pretty lake in the middle of the Arizona desert, a seismic shift unleashes a fissure of fish from the Mesolithic era, and these critters have razorsharp teeth and umpteen centuries of hunger to quench. As they swim toward civilization and the resort community of Lake Victoria, the uncivilized antics of bikinied babes and leering drunken guys during spring break take center stage.
And there are plenty of the usual characters on the menu, including the sheriff (Elisabeth Shue) trying to keep the peace, the sheriff’s son (Vampire Diaries’ Steven R. McQueen) and his longtime gal pal (Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szohr) trying to figure out their next move, and a Girls Gone Wild-styled cokehead director (an uber-sleazy Jerry O’Connell) trying to take the clothes off various nubile ladies for his cinema-verite website. Also attempting to stay away from those chompers: the sheriff’s younger kids (Sage Ryan and Brooklynn Proulx), the director’s sexy models (Riley Steele and Kelly Brook), a hulking deputy (Ving Rhames), a comely seismologist (Dina Meyer) and her snarky associate (Adam Scott), and the required-for-the-genre wacky marine biologist (Christopher Lloyd) who forecasts grim tidings.
Some reviewers chastised Aja’s remake for being too top heavy with the T&A (notably the hedonistic bump-and-grind images during the spring break footage, as well as the casting of some adult-film starlets in small roles) and the nonstop violence of the final halfhour, but they missed the point. When original director Dante worked for schlock cinema pioneer Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s, Corman routinely demanded a certain quota of those exploitive ingredients in every drive-in epic. And if a moviemaker delivered the required goods and much more, as Dante did with his tongue-in-cheek outing (with a satiric script by indie auteur John Sayles, who used his payday to fund his own subsequent projects, plus on-screen cameos by monster-movie greats such as Barbara Steele and Kevin McCarthy), it was considered a bonus for moviegoers.
Aja’s Piranha isn’t in the same rarified league as Dante’s original, but it’s not a cheater remake, either. Instead, enjoy it as undemanding fun designed mainly for gleeful gorehounds, mammary maniacs and connoisseurs of overripe cheese that takes itself without a whit of seriousness. That’s evident with the computer-graphic imagery (CGI) of the fiendish fish, toothsome terrors with their own ghoulish grins, who come across as cartoonish cousins of some long-ago Warner Brothers short subject. It all culminates in a priceless piranha gag (in all senses of the word) that should not be revealed.
And there is one clever moment that, either by accident or design, pays tribute to a horror-flick legacy. The image of a topless parasail rider (porn princess Gianna Michaels) skimming atop the water, while just below a school of piranha is ready to nip her, is reminiscent of Julie Adams undulating to the hearty approval of the title character from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a vintage 3-D frolic. Despite being a box-office under-performer (a worldwide gross of $80 million for a project that cost $25 million), there will also be a rushed sequel (alas, Aja will not be a participant) slated for a September release under the title—and we’re not kidding—Piranha 3-DD.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has the dibs on Piranha’s two-dimensional DVD release, and the company has lavished a surprising amount of care for what some may construe as a lower-case catalog title. The 2.40:1 letterboxed ratio retains the crisp visual styles of directors of photography John Leonetti (topside) and Pete Zuccarini (underwater), both working from the same primary-colored palette and capturing that sense of diamond-hard imagery found in old Russ Meyer features. The photography is eye-popping even without the 3-D spectacles.
(Piranha was conceived as a 3-D feature but had to be shot in 2-D, then converted to 3-D in post-production.)
The DVD also has “Don’t Scream, Just Swim,” a 91-minute, five-part, making-of documentary that is actually longer than the main feature. These vignettes are wall-towall with information, such as horror director Eli Roth (Hostel) explaining that his next acting project after Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds would, of course, be to portray Piranha’s hose-squirting pervy emcee at a wet T-shirt contest who eventually gets decapitated. Yet Piranha’s raison d’etre, to use a phrase from Aja’s countrymen, comes from screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, with Stolberg opining that “There’s no more boobs in horror movies. And we were like, ‘We should have some!’”
The graphic makeup effects by Greg Nicotero are also lovingly displayed, along with some intriguing tidbits such as the fact that the moviemakers actually had to construct a giant tank 30 feet deep and filled with 2 million gallons of water in order to pull off the excessive lakeside mayhem of the piranha invasion, while also adding thousands of gallons of fake blood to keep it real. There is also audition footage of the many extras, some hired for their physical attributes as well as their abilities to deliver blood-curdling screams. And watch for a glimpse of a river raft with two outdoor port-a-potties, just in case you need to know where the location crew goes.
The commentary track with Aja and producers Gregory Levasseur and Alix Taylor has a subtitled option, in deference to Aja and Levasseur’s heavy accents. The filmmakers note their many homages to 1980s movies, but viewers won’t notice until Aja points them out, such as Shue’s connection to Cocktail and Kelly Brook’s anatomical similarities to Cindy Crawford, in addition to pop culture links like young Steven R. McQueen being Bullitt star Steve McQueen’s grandson. The gang also notes that Tarantino requested a must-have death scene featuring a woman’s posterior resting within an inner tube, and cite that Brook and Riley Steele spent weeks working on the choreography for their underwater nude ballet, which might have Agnes de Mille spinning in her grave.
They also allude to deleted scenes that aren’t on the domestic DVD (the Blu-ray version has them, however, and a 3-D platter is also available) and the for-your-awards-consideration spoof that should be on the disc, although it can be accessed on the Funny or Die website. And they take special delight in detailing some of the more outrageous 3-D visuals such as Jessica Szohr upchucking into the camera and Steele spitting out a pesky piranha. (“This is my favorite death scene,” Aja says about three separate demises.) At the 65-minute mark a deadpan Aja declares, “Here is the {prosthetic} penis of Jerry O’Connell. We’ve been very generous with him.”
Seafood buffet: Ving Rhames is the main course in Piranha.
