Deep Thoughs on Piranha 3D

Piranha is not a good movie, but it is just about exactly what you’d expect and thus, it can be a lot of fun if you go into it with the right mindset. It’s one of those movies (like Snakes on a Plane) where movie reviews and ratings won’t really sway an audience. This is a movie where tons of ferocious fish chow down on a bunch of obnoxious kids celebrating Spring Break. That either interests you, or it doesn’t. Either way, I don’t think anyone expects it to be good, and it’s not. So this isn’t really a review, but I had some assorted thoughts I’d like to share.

• So the premise of the film is that an earthquake has opened a hole to a subterranean lake-within-a-lake. Fortuitously, this happens right at the start of Spring Break, when the lake on top of the subterranean lake is normally invaded by drunken teens. What no one knows yet is that the subterranean lake has housed a particularly vicious species of piranha, and later in the film, we meet piranha expert Christopher Lloyd, who informs us that these piranha have been extinct for millions of years, and that these ones only survived because they resorted to cannibalism.

  Obviously, this premise is flimsy and doesn’t really deserve much consideration, but I began to wonder: Is it possible for a species of piranha to survive in isolation by resorting to cannibalism? Imagine my surprise when a very thorough and exhaustive 2 minutes of google searching yielded mildly supportive evidence. Apparently cannibalism is common among fish species and look at this simulation! It’s clear to me that this movie is more plausible than I gave it credit for. I mean, if you can’t trust a tech demo simulation of fish found on the internet, what can you trust?

• Once the shit hits the fan, deputy Ving Rhames yanks a propeller off a boat, starts it up, and proceeds to annihilate all surrounding piranha by swinging the propeller through the air and the water. My question: Once he sticks the propeller in the water, wouldn’t he be, you know, propelled in the opposite direction? My extensive internet research has revealed that it was unwise to apply traditional physics to the awesome power of Ving Rhames. Amazing.

  

• Despite relatively tepid box office returns, this movie was still judged to be a success, and thus we can look forward to Piranha 3D part two, probably next year. For some reason, this made me wonder about the fate of the town in this movie. Surely they would be economically destroyed by this whole disaster. Or maybe not. Maybe they have a surprisingly robust economy and could handle the shock of decreased tourism. I think it actually could be pretty funny to set the sequel in the same town if they could come up with a ridiculous enough justification for it.

I have to admit that I’m surprised at the amount of good press this movie is getting. I mean, it’s essentially a remake of a 30 year old, low budget, exploitative rip-off of Jaws, and it attempts to do approximately nothing new with the premise, unless you count the addition of the typical 21st century mean streak that has emerged in most horror of this decade. Oh, and I guess the underwater ballet sequence is astounding in its gratuitous glory. It’s a bad movie, but I had fun with it.