It’s not particularly easy recommending Alexandre Aja’s Piranha – not because it’s beneath my readers’ discriminating tastes – but because it’s ultimately a waste of Aja’s directorial potential. Aja more or less ushered in the new wave of French horror with 2003’s almost-wordless High Tension (see a short blurb at the bottom of this entry on the best films I saw in 2006), then promptly plunged to the bottom with an unnecessary remake (The Hills Have Eyes, from 2006) and the dreadful Mirrors (2008). He’s back to plumbing the depths again, but this time they harbor prehistoric horrors, when an earthquake unleashes savage schools of piranha from an underwater lake onto frolicking college students during Spring Break.
So it’s hard to say that Piranha is Aja’s “return to form,” although it’s such toothy fun – a shameless, unpretentious homage to those campy horror movies from the early ‘80s that served up titties and dismemberment… in 3D, no less. Aja gleefully uses these criteria to make his cinematic decisions: why just show a topless woman parasailing, when you can have her parasailing topless and have her body nibbled by piranha from her torso down? The piranha aren’t alien spawn, or radioactive mutants; “this particular piranha,” we’re informed by one of three actors making hilarious cameos, “vanished two million years ago!” Primitive, maybe, but surely the fact that the piranhas resurface for their meal right during a wet T-shirt contest (hosted by Eli Roth) is proof of some sort of piscine intelligence? Piranha stars Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award-nominated actress Elisabeth Shue, Emmy Award-winning actor Christopher Lloyd, Golden Globe Award-winning actor Ving Rhames, Adult Video News Award-winning actress Gianna Michaels, and Adult Video News Award-nominees Riley Steele and Ashley Brooke, all upstaged by thousands of hungry fish.
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