Something Fishy

I hadn't really been planning to see the new movie Piranha 3D, but then -- amazingly -- it started to actually get a notable number of good reviews. I still probably wouldn't have gone, but a friend called me out of the blue today and suggested we give it a shot.

There's a lot about this movie that's really hard to believe. And I'm not even talking about the plot conceit of a million-year-old underground lake being exposed in an earthquake and giving rise to prehistoric killer piranhas. No, it starts with the cast itself.

How did Elizabeth Shue, an Oscar nominee, end up in a silly movie like this? How about Christopher Lloyd? Or how did they get Richard Dreyfuss -- an actual Oscar winner -- to come in and sort-of send up his famous character from Jaws to open the film?

Or the biggest question of all: is there anything they wouldn't put on film?

The movie is gratuitous on every level. The gore is so far over the top, you can't even see the top. The nudity is even more outrageous, and strategically used in ways that... uh... let's say embrace the 3D. And the movie seems completely self-conscious, totally unashamed of being this way. Every crazy scene that comes along seems to subtextually say: "what's your problem; you knew what you were coming to see."

In case you don't know, let's be clear here: this is not truly a horror movie. It's not scary, and I don't think it means to be. It means to be funny, in the so preposterous you have to laugh way.

So how do you rate a movie like this? I mean, objectively, it's pretty terrible. The characters are shallow, the plot is stupid. But if you can let all that go for even a few moments at a time, it delivers on a visceral level -- exactly what it promises, in masterful style.

I guess I'm going to call it a C+. If you like schlock, you'll love it. The rest of you probably didn't need me to tell you that you wouldn't like it.