Toying with Death: THE MONKEY

The Monkey is a funny, nasty little thing: a cockeyed horror movie with explosive gore served up as punchlines. Those are real gags in both senses of the word. Its horror is both archly told and earnestly felt. The blend of random violence and cornball sentimentality signals it as authentically Stephen King. It’s based on one of his short stories, after all. But it also makes it a satisfying, wild-eyed B-side to its writer-director Osgood Perkins’ previous feature, Longlegs. That surprise hit of last summer was a droning, portentous demonic serial killer movie. This one is about twin boys who discover a cursed wind-up monkey. Both pictures are about a legacy of family trauma, the capriciousness of fragile life and random death, and a possibly quixotic attempt by children to atone for the sins of their parents. Longlegs did so with a sly sense of silliness percolating under its grim straight-faced sense of doom that feels a little empty by the end. I liked The Monkey’s approach more, for its oddball turns and jabs, and its sense of accumulating absurdity. The twins don’t know the toy monkey’s deadly curse—but we know immediately it’s up to no good since the movie starts with their father (Adam Scott) trying to sell it in a pawn shop, an effort thwarted by a sudden accident taking the shopkeeper’s life. He’s abandoned his boys years ago, though, and their mother (Tatiana Maslany) isn’t talking about him. Snooping for information, the boys find the cursed thing in the back of a closet. Let the random deaths begin. 

The movie wastes no time quickly and impactfully killing off a few characters, then jumps ahead 25 years to find the meeker of the boys (grown in Theo James) having deliberately isolated himself from others to avoid the pain of losing them. Too bad, then, that the monkey will make a comeback and leave a bloody trail in its mechanically-drumming wake. In true King fashion, the grown-up kids feel they're the only ones who can stop It. By rooting the movie in a very real sense of dawning childhood awareness of death, it makes even the most outrageous moments—an explosive electrocution, a bowling ball smushing a face, a trampled sleeping bag that might as well be filled with cherry pie filling—a sense of absurd dread. (It's like Sam Raimi doing Creepshow.) Here’s a pitch black horror comedy—laced with a sense of ironic impending doom—about existential grief that stems from fluke accidental death, and how deranged we can get in our denials, and our attempts to explain it away. How fragile the human body. How fragile our efforts to forget that. After one early, poignantly shattering death, one of the boys tells us the chances of such an event were one in 44 million. Cold comfort, since he says it means to him that it has to happen to somebody. The movie sits in that cold pessimism, and the preposterously frightening ways it comes to pass.

You Better Watch Out: KRAMPUS

A dreary lump of coal, Krampus is a horror movie with the just-in-time-for-the-holidays message that if you have a bad attitude about being trapped in a house with objectively awful relatives on Christmas, demonic creatures will drag your entire family to a snowy doom. Loosely inspired by the Germanic legend of Krampus, a devilish horned anti-Santa who punishes bad children, writer-director Michael Dougherty has a broad, overlit Christmas comedy darkened and invaded by malevolent critters and supernatural beasties who pick off an extended family one by one. His previous film was 2009’s Halloween-set horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat, so he knows his way around bending holiday iconography to horror ends. Of course Christmas imagery is more incongruous when put to that purpose, with sleigh bells and hoof-steps up on the housetop creating an ominous foreboding instead of the delight of reindeer paws. I’m all for a Christmas horror movie, but this one’s chintzy and half-baked, not nice, and not naughty enough either.

It starts with thin stereotypes stretched to mildly routine satire about commercialism and losing the spirit of the season. After a slow-motion brawl in a big box store over the opening credits – set to a cheery carol, an obvious juxtaposition, but worth a smile – we meet a harried family busy preparing for holiday guests. A workaholic father (Adam Scott), perfectionist mother (Toni Collette), and cynical teenage sister (Stefania LaVie Owen), have little time to indulge young Max (Emjay Anthony) and his childlike whimsy, namely his lingering belief in Santa. It gets worse when boorish overnight guests descend, an uncle (David Koechner), aunt (Allison Tolman), great aunt (Conchata Ferrell), and cousins (a pack of funny young newcomers), each one rude, uncouth, loud, and mean. Not even a sweet German grandmother (Krista Stadler) can keep belief in pure Christmas magic alive when these branches of the family tree collide.

The formulation of these characters is so scattershot and obvious no one is worth caring about, let alone believing. The guests are rough-and-tumble, gun-toting, bullying dopes. Their hosts are not much better: distracted, snobby, bitter, elitist, and judgmental. Unfair extremes painted in ugly colors, everyone acts more like political cartoons than real people. And why do they put up with each other? “Because we’re family,” dopey dad tells little Max, who later secretly, tearfully rips up his letter to Santa and throws it out the window. There, the cold winds convert his negative energy, a wish to be rid of annoying relatives (totally understandable), into a massive blizzard that knocks out the power and snows everyone in. The better to be attacked by Krampus and his evil elves, naturally. It can’t come fast enough.

But the film proceeds in fits and starts. Characters wander away and disappear. Everyone is worried for a moment, formulating rescue plans, troubleshooting how best to escape. Then we’re on to the next attack, token worry for the missing (mostly kids!) immediately followed with batten-down-the-hatches, load-the-weapons strategizing and monster smashing. The problem is that these crass bad-sitcom types react like they know they’re suddenly in a horror movie, and not even in a jokey meta or savvy genre way. The instant the action starts – snowmen mysteriously appear in the front yard, a girl disappears, a snowdrift gets bitey, etcetera – they’re hammering wood over the windows and ready to fight off invaders. And don’t even get me started on the grandma, who knows exactly what’s happening from the jump and waits way too long before she clues the rest in on the details. The tension is largely non-existent, mostly because their troubles never seem all that serious.

Dougherty clearly has a lot of fun tweaking Christmas movie tropes with monster movie jolts. The creative creature effects – largely convincing and tactile things – are the clear star here. There are impish gingerbread men, a pack of creepy elves with unmoving mask-faces, malicious toys, and a drooling, fanged tree-topper angel. Krampus himself is merely suggested, before revealing his massive part-goat, part-devil, part-Santa design. My favorite, though, was a jack-in-the-box that starts small, but balloons to the size of an overstuffed anaconda with a clown face dripping an elongated alien jaw, all teeth and fleshy gullet. These monsters are so effectively visualized and imaginatively designed I wish Dougherty, with co-writers Todd Casey and Zach Shields, designed more compellingly staged sequences around them, or at least made me care about who they were attacking and why.

Besides, for its nasty streak and creature feature jabs, it’s too sugary sweet to commit to anything but an ending of family togetherness wrapped in false comfort. In other words, the movie simultaneously embraces and rejects holiday cynicism, thoroughly undoing any potential points of satiric interest and muddying its point of view. It ends up literally about nothing: a phony Christmas platitude wrapped in a weak B-movie twist. This would be an easier movie to recommend if the jokes were funny and the scares were scary. As is, it’s a great idea done half as well as I hoped. Imagine someone took the greatest holiday horror comedy, Joe Dante’s Gremlins, drained it of energy, then thoroughly defanged its filmmaking and perspective and you’re onto the sense of emptiness I felt in every scene of Krampus.

Bad Fellas: BLACK MASS

Black Mass is a true crime gangster picture that doesn’t have a perspective or opinion on the events it recounts. It is content to grimly reenact backroom power plays and violent hits without caring too much about what it meant to the people involved, let alone using the proceedings as windows into their psyches. Set in Boston during the reign of crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who muscled out the Italian mob to become the city’s main source of organized crime, the screenplay makes clear the ties of neighborhood loyalty. This allowed Bulger to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with an FBI agent who once was a schoolyard chum, feeding information about his rivals while receiving a blind eye to his own criminal enterprises. This, along with a senator for a brother, allowed him to remain untouched for decades.

Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Get on Up) start in 1975 and work their way to 1995, following Bulger from humble nastiness to king of crime before it all unravels for him. Perhaps assuming the target audience has seen some gangster stories play out before, the film is not particularly interested in the how or what of its characters’ schemes, and is never clear about the nature of his income. Instead, it features tight close-ups and slow zooms highlighting small shifts in negotiations and power plays. The recurring moments are either intimately creepy – Bulger staring down another person with intimidating intensity until they give him what he wants – or violent, with killings telegraphed beyond the point of surprise arriving with nonetheless brutal force. What are we to make of these murders? Only that they’re senseless, I suppose.

A large ensemble of reliable talents slurring through a variety of phony Boston accents keep things watchable and reasonably interesting on a moment by moment basis. Joel Edgerton is a slimy FBI agent too close to Bulger, protecting him from his law enforcement colleagues (Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll) and their suspicions they’re not getting appropriately valuable intel for all the damage caused. Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, and W. Earl Brown are Whitey’s flunkies, who do a lot of the beating and killing, and drop in and out of the narrative. Benedict Cumberbatch is Bulger’s brother, affectionate but precious about keeping his office out of crime. And in this masculine environment of jockeying for power and speaking in deep whispers, a trio of female roles (for Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, and Juno Temple) exists to provide people who think this whole thing is dangerous but have no way of stopping it.

The proceedings are the sort of surface seriousness that coasts on the appearance of heavy subject matter without actually engaging with the thematic content that could exist under the surface. Cooper’s too interested in directing the logistics of the large ensemble, making sure everyone’s posing in the correct period detail and mushing their Rs into appropriate vaguely Bostonian sounds. The potentially fascinating story of corruption and crime is told through solid craft, Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography finely textured, David Rosenbaum’s editing steadily accumulating mild dread at the story’s most dramatic moments of threat. But there’s never a sense of what all the blood and backstabbing really means for the people involved beyond the simple facts of the case, and no foothold for either a formless “that’s life” truthiness or rigorous moralizing. It goes straight up the middle, ending up nowhere.

The mystery at the center remains the man himself, a presence and an instigator throughout the narrative who somehow remains stubbornly out of focus. How did he first rise to power? What made him the top Irish mobster? What did he think about what he did? We don’t know from this film. Here he seems to emerge fully formed from the shadows. Played by Johnny Depp at his least communicative and yet somehow as, if not more, affected than his Mortdecai or Mad Hatter, his countenance is entombed in artifice. Dead ice blue eyes pop against sickly pale skin, his face remolded out of makeup effects into something that’s always off-putting and unnatural. His Bulger is spooky, moving stiffly, holding his posture rigid, always frowning. He lurks in dark corners, most creepy when he stands hidden in an empty church nook, or when he interrupts a woman reading The Exorcist to calmly, threateningly run his hand along her face and neck.

Presenting the facts in a style synthesized and hollowed out from an amalgamation of every gangster picture that came before is one thing. But to plunk a performance like Depp’s in the middle of it – so artificial, so designed, so immediately signaling evil – is strange. It’s an interesting approach, more Karloff than DeNiro, more Michael Myers than Brando. He doesn’t seem like a real person. He looks like he should’ve been featured in Famous Monsters of Filmland fifty years ago. It makes impossible the notion we should take this seriously as a look into the face of real evil that men do. Besides, the movie’s too unfocused to even activate the Nosferatu qualities of Depp’s work. It’s a case of a project with a script, a director, and a lead performance working at cross purposes. It’s too shallow to be a weighty exploration of crime and punishment, too restrained to be pulpy fun, and too unwilling to follow an eccentric lead into a more overtly nightmarish direction. It’s competent enough to work scene by scene, but adds up to a missed opportunity all around.

Couples Retreat: THE OVERNIGHT

Cramped cringe comedy near its most unpleasant, Patrick Brice’s The Overnight finds a boring married couple dragged into an unpleasant and unusual dinner party. Imagine Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without the witty dialogue or precision characterizations. New to Los Angeles, the couple (Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott) jumps at the opportunity to meet new people when their young son makes a new friend whose dad (Jason Schwartzman) invites them over for pizza. He seems nice, but soon he and his wife (Judith Godrèche) are talking about her career modeling breast pumps, offering weed and wine, showing off his intimate paintings, and offering a skinny dip in the pool. Scott and Schilling do an adequate job locating the uneasy confusion the couple feels when confronted with what appears to be a pair of predatory libertines.

They pull horrified faces and slide into unease as they’re testing the limits of personal boundaries and inhibitions. It should be funny, but it coasts on thin characters’ potential embarrassment instead of writing funny scenes. (The cast is full of likable performers who’ve never been duller.) Schwartzman’s character sidles up to a stoned Scott, leads him to the basement, and coos at him about posing for some casual pictures, coaxing him to take his shirt off and bend over. That’s a scene played for creepiness. Even closer to horror-tinged squeamishness is a sequence in which Godrèche tricks Schilling into a massage parlor and locks her in a room, the better to look through a peephole as a stranger gets rubbed. So many of these scenes are shot with queasy creep-out vibes, especially as the color red washes through the cheap digital cinematography and we get intense close-ups of an eye twitching, gawking in cautious curiosity.

Such a stumbling and mumbling sort of discomfort, these detours into nauseous suspense had me wondering if we were in for a bloodbath serial killer Texas Chainsaw ending. Of course that’s not actually the case. By its final scenes, Brice reveals he’s been making a movie about how uptight we all are, and how we stew in our loneliness instead of reaching out to others. It’s a good idea in theory, but one that bungles its intent by trading on creepy-crawly horror movie mechanics for the majority of its runtime. Even though there are all the usual fumbling one-liners and boozing and dancing montages a party movie provides, they’re constantly undercut by a flat-footed unease that thinks it’s more interesting than it is. So visually and emotionally impoverished, I found it almost unwatchable at times as it continually teases explicitness and epiphanies it never actually gets around to.

As the night progresses, the discomfort gives way to tentative half-formed (half-convincing) friendships. All four characters spill insecurities along the way, like a cracked support group, but they’re revealing body image issues, marital boredom, and other ideas explored better elsewhere. And there’s no real sense impromptu therapy sessions are opening up naturally. It’s all too calculated for therapeutic exhibitionism, for revealing real discomfort as people blindly grasp for validation and comfort from strangers. But right where the affected creepiness falls away to a moment of real connection, the movie pulls back. It comes on so strong and wrong for the better part of an hour, forcing the audience to look at flat, ugly framing and smeary colors as characters engage in cringe-worthy behavior, it’s dismaying to see it go so flaccid in the end.

It wants to build to a transgressive open-minded climax, but is too cramped and judgmental to pull off a Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice breezy acceptance. How else to explain its most revealing scene, where wobbling artificial body parts are used for a joke, then later used as a source of magnanimous acceptance? It’s difficult to be asked to laugh at someone’s body and then, a minute later, get pat on the back for recognizing the error of body shaming. The Overnight simply lacks the dexterity to turn from a freak show cringe comedy to an empathetic coming together. It manages to back away from its final implications into a wan punch line instead of dealing with the far more interesting ramifications of the place at which it arrives.

Dream On: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an ode to manufactured uplift and insta-insight. Loosely extrapolated from James Thurber’s short story of the same name by screenwriter Steve Conrad of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, this is another of his stories about an everyman who finds his employment or lack thereof not providing enough fulfillments. It’s something of a parable about getting the courage to live your dreams, travelling the world to find you had what you needed inside you all along. Directed by and starring Ben Stiller, the film follows him as Walter, the man of the title. He’s dedicated to helping his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine) and to his job keeping track of the original negatives of every photo for Life magazine. Unfortunately, a mixture of personality and circumstance has found his dream of travelling the world and having experiences beyond the cubicle long forgotten. He’s like George Bailey without all those wonderful life moments an angel could show him. Walter Mitty wants more, retreating into his mind for daydreams of grandeur, of saying the right thing or saving the day. Alas, they aren’t to be. Yet.

For the swooping sentimental arc of Conrad’s screenplay to fully take off, events conspire to push Walter out of his comfort zone. The magazine is in the process of shutting down, led by a jerk manager (Adam Scott) who sneers at the employees with contempt as he pushes them out the door, managing their livelihood’s transition to a web-only all-digital format that needs only a skeleton crew to manage. Their best field photographer (Sean Penn) sends a roll of film, designating a particular shot as the perfect one to grace the final print cover. When Walter looks through the photos, the one he needs is missing. Getting up the courage to ask the co-worker he has a crush on (Kristen Wiig) to help him track down the photographer's next dangerous photo shoot, Walter decides to throw himself into solving this particular mystery of the missing cover photo. Why? He just does. It’s a prefab situation ripe with symbolic import that pushes him out the door, following clues to their globetrotting destinations.

Stiller’s direction – fussily composed with impressive formal control – has faint echoes of Wes Anderson and, fainter still, Jacques Tati, as he builds a world of modern architecture and office spaces that are totally ordered and closing in. Walter’s daydreams, on the other hand, are glossy Hollywood dreams in which he becomes a quipping comedy star ready with a comeback, a rugged lover clambering down a mountain to the woman he wants to woo, or a superhero smashing down the city streets after his nemesis. More than once he’s told he has great imagination. Maybe so, but he could also just watch a lot of movies. By the time he’s out in the real world, the picture takes on a shiny widescreen postcard look, soaring over mountain ranges and ocean waves, finding Walter as a small piece of big world, small in big frames and vast vistas.

It’s all so gently sentimental as the self-help mysticism of living his dreams of adventuring helps him to become his best self. And yet it all feels so artificial and contrived, a perfect closed system of a film studded with obvious turns of the gears and pulls of the strings. I could see every payoff clearly with each setup, no matter how lovingly photographed by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh. It’s a gorgeously composed film that’s suffocating in its surface beauty. Each step of his journey feels preordained and carefully composed in a way that doesn’t match the gathering of courage necessary to take such a journey. Here, obstacles –sharks, volcanoes, warlords, drunken helicopter pilots – aren’t so much something to overcome as Hollywood spectacle to experience.

Perhaps there isn’t enough differentiation between his daydreams and his real world, after all. Sure, he’s not really leaping out of a skyscraper with newfound super-strength, as he imagines at one point. But I’m not sure how the Walter we meet becomes a guy who can climb enormous mountains all on his own. Maybe the filmmakers sympathized so greatly they couldn’t help but want to push Walter along and see his character arc through. I can hardly blame them. Stiller brings a sympathetic nuance to the man’s personality, a kind of hunched tentativeness that’s easy enough to relate with. The perfection of his self-improvement narrative is almost how he’d dream it. But the film dare not suggest such a possibility. Where the film goes wrong is erring on the side of too much earnestness, a fuzzy and warm belief in the power of sentimental uplift to do good to the soul. It’s a comfortable erring, but one that feels a little empty all the same.

Brother's Keepers: OUR IDIOT BROTHER

Despite a title that sounds like a mean-spirited insult, Our Idiot Brother turns out to be one of the sweetest, kindest, warmest, and generous comedies of the year. It’s an R-rated movie that’s so big hearted it barely registers as raunchy, that loves its characters and wants to see them end up happy. It’s surprisingly fleet, nimbly shifting registers between straight-faced silliness and heartfelt emotion. By the time the film ended I was sad to see it go. Perhaps this summer’s mostly misfiring comedies wore me down, but this is exactly the kind of nice, refreshing, genuine entertainment I didn’t know I was yearning to see.

The film stars Paul Rudd as a man who has to be one of the nicest people on the planet. He has long hair, a casually messy wardrobe, and an easy smile. He treats everyone he meets in a similar way, speaking to them in a soft easygoing voice. He just loves life, aimless and simple as his is, but he keeps inadvertently making things difficult for those around him. He means well, but his complete refusal to go along with little white lies, his scrupulous honesty and his instinctual mellow kindness, unravels situations that are held together by nothing more than all the small untruths people tell themselves and each other. He’s lucky that his unconditional love for his family is (mostly) returned. Even when they are utterly exasperated, there’s real familiar warmth.

He bumbles through the lives of his sisters after he’s released from jail. Oh, he’s not a criminal of any terrible import. In the opening scene, he sells pot to a uniformed police officer just because the man seemed to be having a tough day. Upon his release, it’s this fact that causes his parole officer (Sterling Brown) to assume that he’s “retarded.” “I get that a lot,” Rudd says.

Since his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) dumped him and won’t even let him take Willie Nelson, their dog (major bummer), the newly free Rudd crashes at the house of his mom (Shirley Knight), but soon makes his way to each of his sisters’ New York houses in turn. There’s the high-strung sister (Emily Mortimer) with two kids and an inattentive husband (Steve Coogan), the ambitious professional journalist sister (Elizabeth Banks) with a casual relationship with her neighbor (Adam Scott), and the free-spirit lesbian sister (Zooey Deschanel) in a committed relationship with a lawyer (Rashida Jones). While there are differences between the siblings, and a fair number of conflicts, this is not simply a dysfunctional family. This may be a film that showed at Sundance, but it doesn’t betray the aggressive quirk for quirk’s sake, the ugly look-at-these-wacky-losers aftertaste that infects the worst of what is lumped into loosely defined “indie comedy” prejudices.

Director Jesse Peretz and writers Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall have crafted a rather loose and unhurried film that amiably ambles from enjoyable scene to enjoyable scene, funny in ways that provoke smiles more often than belly laughs. It’s remarkably unremarkable. The very lack of showiness – there’s no irritating insistence in its comedy – is its greatest virtue. This gives room for the characters to completely take over, dominating the central interest. The ensemble is uniformly excellent and their characters compelling. The relationships and conflicts between these characters are written in an ever so slightly over-the-top way that manages to stay relatable, if not entirely believable.

In this talented cast, Rudd stands out above them all. He’s such an appealing character. He may wear Crocs, lack ambitions, and be way too trusting, but he’s so very nice and, doggone it all, wouldn’t it be fun to hang out with him? It may be tiresome, it may be trying, but just like his sisters, I found that this is one social idiot just too lovable to dismiss. Likewise, the film is, in its own quiet way, utterly charming, sneakily effective and even a little bit moving.

A Fish Called PIRANHA

Piranha in 3D is a disappointment in all three dimensions, though not for lack of trying. Alexandre Aja’s movie is a winking horror-comedy with a tongue so firmly in the cheek that it draws blood. It’s gratuitous in every possible way, up to and including its very existence, with something sure to offend every large portion of the general public, and yet the film never manages to generate any real transgressive charge. By the end of the run time, when the credits started to roll, I found myself thinking, “is that all there is?”

Aja’s always been a fine stylist of horror imagery, but I’ve found his prior works to be shockingly lacking, with High Tension and Mirrors containing plot holes so large and shocks so predictable that any sense of fun or danger is entirely missing. His small stylistic touches weren’t enough to alleviate my pure boredom with those projects. With Piranha, a remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Roger-Corman-produced Jaws-inspired creature-feature, Aja has created his best film, but it’s still a disappointment. I liked just enough of it to wish it were better.

The movie starts promisingly enough with small-town sheriff Elisabeth Shue investigating a missing local (Richard Dreyfuss) and welcoming a team of geologists, led by Adam Scott, who are investigating recent seismic activity in the area. All of this is set against the backdrop of a busy Spring Break weekend that has brought hoards of idiotic amoral pleasure-seekers to writhe in the water. There’s a seedy carnival atmosphere taking over the town with slimy video producers (Jerry O’Connell and Paul Scheer) and a sleazy wet-T-shirt contest host (Eli Roth) playing ringmasters to the debauchery. It’s not a good sign that Shue’s teen son (Steven McQueen, Steve’s grandson) gets pulled into the craziness. And you know things are out of control when not even Ving Rhames with a bullhorn can command the crowd’s attention.

Of course, there are even bigger problems than crazy college kids. Those would be the thousands of starving prehistoric piranha that the aforementioned seismic activity has unleashed. Local scientist Doc Brown, I mean, Mr. Goodman (played by none other than – great Scott! – Christopher Lloyd) has grave pronouncements to make about the deadliness and danger brought by these aquatic killers. The opening scenes, and perhaps even half of the movie, alternate between scenes of ridiculously vulgar partying and swift, ominous shadows darting through the water. By the time the piranha attacks arrive, I was good and ready for some creepy-cool 3D comeuppances.

Rather than spacing them out through the length of the film, the majority of the deaths occur during one long bloody massacre of Spring-Breakers in what can only be described as the goofy gory centerpiece of the film. To be sure, some of the deaths are quite witty, like when a particularly buxom babe gets sucked underwater with, seconds later, two silicone spheres floating to the surface. It’s also a chilling rush to see hundreds of people thrashing through the water past their dying friends, capsizing boats and rafts while piranhas get blown away with shotguns and sliced to bits with boat motors. The water runs red with the blood of man and beast alike. But, after a while, what starts as horror-movie fun just grows sad. There’s a consistent, persistent intensity to this sequence that becomes literal overkill. The violence is so vivid and so sustained that it moves well past its purpose.

After the massacre we are given some perfunctory scenes of action and incident that are meant to resolve the immediate peril of the surviving characters. But then, it’s over. There’s a nice, shocking punchline that sends us into the credits (albeit one that’s front and center in the advertising), but the sense of disappointment is tough to shake. Sure, Shue’s family gives the movie a nice through line, but there’s little else of narrative interest. As the credits rolled, I found myself in a state of disbelief. The movie feels unfinished, like screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg wrote two-thirds of story and then never got around to writing a proper climax. The massacre makes for an overlong climax when it really feels like it should be the midpoint. I didn’t exactly enjoy the movie, but I wish it were longer.

Then again, this is a movie that really only promises to give you people being eaten by piranhas in 3D. It succeeds on that count. But the violence would have gone down better if it weren’t so confined in mostly that one sequence. And when the movie comes stocked with such charismatic performers like Lloyd and Rhames, Shue and Scott, is it wrong to expect that they be given something to do? They barely have a chance to stretch their genre muscles. Aja has made a movie that’s in the spirit of all kinds of fun, trashy low-budget horror flicks, but he is much more successful at bringing the trashy than making it fun.