Fish Food: PIRANHA 3DD

I looked up what I wrote about Piranha, Alexandre Aja’s 2010 3D remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 creature feature, and found that I called it “gratuitous in every possible way.” It served up attractive spring-breakers in and out of swimsuits while tension built to the bloody end, which chummed the water with enough gore to fill a half-dozen horror flicks with lower body counts. I wrote, “I liked just enough of it to wish it were better.” It didn’t win me over like it did its small collection of defenders, but I could see that it was self-aware of its own genre status and enjoyed wallowing in it. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone’s enjoyment of this particular film’s trashy interests. I know I did from time to time, even if I ultimately left the theater feeling, on balance, more negative than positive towards it all.

Now we have Piranha 3DD.  Its predecessor’s central question was “What if we made a bad movie, but were so aware of what we were doing, and so energetic about our exploitative elements, that we ended up with a good movie?” This lifeless sequel that stinks of desperation at every turn seems to proceed from the question “What if we made a bad movie?” Now, I don’t mind partaking in some deliberately trashy filmmaking. I’ve already admitted to enjoying some of Piranha’s low charms and found David R. Ellis’s immortal Snakes on a Plane to be some level of fun. Here are films that know what simple-minded premises they have, are reasonably well made from a technical standpoint, and have just enough winking bemusement that some can be convinced to give them a pass. (I feel no shame admitting to a weakness for Snakes on a Plane. Of course I haven’t seen it in years. It might not hold up to a repeat viewing.)

Anyways, Piranha 3DD has been handed off to director John Gulager, winner of one of the seasons of the Project Greenlight reality show. He ended up making the low-budget horror movie Feast, one of the most noxious and slapdash films of its ilk in recent memory, and then followed it up with not one, but two direct-to-DVD sequels, the viewing of which I have not made a priority. This new movie, written by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, and Joel Soisson, relocates the titular piranhas from the inland lake spring break of the first movie to a waterpark run by a slimeball (David Koechner) with a sleazy idea for how to boost profits. See, he hired “water-certified strippers” to lifeguard a walled-off section of the park he calls an “adults only” pool. His stepdaughter (Danielle Panabaker), home from college where she’s studying to be a marine biologist, isn’t happy about this. She’s all the more worried when she and some friends are nearly eaten by, what else, a piranha in the nearby lake.

The plot, such as it is, is a dull drag to the park’s opening day, where the splashing park patrons will get set upon by a pack of piranhas that find their way through a drain pipe out of the lake and into the pools. But because the pool isn’t as packed with partying jerks as the first movie’s lake and the debauchery is mostly low-key and cordoned off, the kick of seeing anonymous extras taken down isn’t satisfying in the slightest. The bloodbath of the first film may have been too much for me to take, but it’s certainly far more enjoyable than seeing families, kids, and elderly people splashing about in terror in the shallow end of a pool. Besides, why don’t they just get out of the pool? And why don’t the waterpark’s employees think to drain the pool sooner? And when they decide to, why is it so difficult?

There’s very little of narrative interest here. The characters are incredibly thin, even by bad creature feature standards. There’s a little romance for the stepdaughter, a wimpy guy (Matt Bush) who can’t swim (think that’ll be important later?) and a crooked deputy (Chris Zylka). There’s also a dumb blonde (Katrina Bowden) who, early on, gets a baby piranha stuck in a very uncomfortable place without even really noticing it. Later, when it emerges and bites off her boyfriend’s privates, she runs bloody and shocked down the hall, finds her friends and informs them of this elaborate body horror in a tone of voice that one might use when asking to borrow a cup of sugar. Basically, these characters are here to state the obvious, go completely unprepared for the climactic buffet, and pad the runtime to feature length.

It’s advertised as an 83-minute movie but, by my count, the credits rolled a little bit past the 70-minute mark, which means that the endless bloopers and outtakes under the end credits take up about 15% of the movie. And keep in mind that this is a movie that finds time for Gary Busey to accidentally blow up a flatulent cow, for David Hasselhoff to lamely cameo as himself, and to shoehorn in supporting characters from the first movie, like Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames and Paul Scheer, the latter seemingly there only to collect stories for How Did This Get Made?, his podcast celebrating bad movies. This is one of those movies where seemingly nothing could go right, not even a little bit, not even by accident.

Beyond the mindless plotting, essentially nonexistent characters, and padding, the biggest problem here has to be Gulager himself. I don’t want to be too mean here, but he’s a remarkably untalented director. With his clumsy blocking, awkward pacing, and half-hazard effects, his anti-style manages to dismantle even the slightest hints of tension or energy that creeps up into the performances and the script. His direction of the setpieces, such as they are, manages to turn them into lifeless lumps of movement devoid of flow or excitement of any kind. It’s like he set out to deliberately make a bad movie, which he may very well have. But it takes a lot of work to make even a bad movie. It might take even more work to make a good bad movie. And this one feels so dashed off and lazily made that it can’t even flop over the painfully low bar it sets for itself.

Catching Up on 2011: Twists and Turns Edition

In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Thomas Dekker stars as a college student who harbors a crush on his dumb surfer roommate (Chris Zylka).  He - Dekker, not the roommate - is a troubled guy, trying to figure out who he is and find his place in the world. Chowing down in the cafeteria, he confides in his best friend (Haley Bennett). They chat about the usual college topics: relationships and classes. Their rapport has a lived-in chemistry. They have fun being with each other and, consequently, they’re fun to watch. Around this little R-rated collegiate comedy spins an increasingly paranoid frenzy of plot that includes missing persons, a jealous lesbian witch (Roxane Mesquida), people in animal masks, a flirty party girl (Juno Temple), a doomsday cult, a pot-fueled prophet (James Duval), and the End of the World. It’s a fevered concoction, like a messy, madly uneven collaboration between David Lynch, Richard Kelly, and Diablo Cody. It’s also distinctly Araki, harkening back to the mix of tactile sensual imagery and commitment to heightened cartoonish grotesquery that he was deploying early in his career in wild, scattershot efforts like 1995’s The Doom Generation. He’s dialed back the intensity in the interim and, though it shares the DNA, Kaboom benefits from Araki’s more mature, experienced eye. The film’s no less of a mess, but it feels significantly more considered in its choices, a kind of careful craziness, a kind of tidy disorder to be found. It’s a sexy, vibrant jumble of weirdness and hilarity that is uneven but entertaining right up until its rushed climax that sucks the fun out of it all. To a certain extent, this feels like a deeply strange, very funny, sometimes creepy, often brilliant TV show with one or two seasons shoved into 80 minutes. With a complicated narrative structure of interwoven and overlapping hallucinations, amorous fantasies, drug trips, and bad dreams that culminates (spoiler!) in a literal apocalyptic explosion, the film keeps Dekker at the center, grounding it all. On a plot level it may be crazy and unsatisfying, but the metaphor rings true. To searching college kids floating around in hormonal ennui, the stakes of self-discovery can seem downright cataclysmic in proportions. 

A sturdy ensemble anchors The Lincoln Lawyer, a fairly standard legal thriller, the kind with twists that are only surprising to someone who has never experienced a legal thriller of any kind, not even an episode of Law & Order or a thick, forgettable airport novel. The script from John Romano, from a novel by Michael Connelly, gives Matthew McConaughey a rare suitable role that finds a way to channel his default sleaziness into an actual character. He’s an L.A. defense attorney working out of his car when he’s hired by a rich guy (Ryan Phillippe) who needs to beat an assault charge. The problem is that McConaughey begins to have good reason to think that his client really did brutally beat a prostitute and feels sick about defending him. He thinks his way through the criminal justice system, trying to alternately outwit and work with prosecutors (Marisa Tomei and Josh Lucas), cops (John Leguizamo and Bryan Cranston), an investigator (William H. Macy), and an inmate (Michael Peña). It’s all a slick bore. Now, this might sound like nitpicking, but the thing that most bugged me about this mediocre entertainment were the wobbly little zooms that director Brad Furman would drop into scenes for no apparent reason. A standard dialogue scene would be humming right along and then, zoom, we zip a little closer to the person talking. Sometimes, the zoom would take us back a few inches, just to mix things up. While I’ll admit that it’s definitely a minor stylistic tick and certainly not one that pervades every scene, it’s also indicative of a larger failing of Furman’s. This is a film that feels as if it’s breathlessly trying to become a better movie, but just can’t make it. Every little tick in the style just struck me as an empty gesture, a failed attempt to make the uninteresting interesting.

Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, handsome and clean-cut in a way that invites easy empathy) is a young man who leaves the family business, a mortuary run by his father (Rutger Hauer), to attend seminary school. Flash forward to just before he is scheduled to become a priest. He’s lost his faith. He’s not sure he believes in God anymore, even (or is that especially?) when he witnesses a freak accident and kneels over a dying woman, reluctantly giving her the last rites. The head of his program (Toby Jones) asks him to reconsider his decision to abandon the church and gets him to agree to a trip to Rome where he will enroll in a class for exorcism training from the esteemed Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds). Once there, he finds he still has his doubts. Aren’t the possessed simply mentally ill? He’s taken under the wing of a grave master exorcist (crinkled, latter-day Anthony Hopkins) and finds much to test his doubt. This is Mikael Håfström’s The Rite, which screenwriter Michael Petroni claims, in line with a dubious horror tradition, to be suggested by a true story. It coasts a bit too far on its easy pop-psychological pseudo-religious conflict, but has such a tremendously oppressive sense of somber, suffocating Catholic dread that I couldn’t help but be jangled about. The actors are fantastic all, matching the film’s earnestness and solemnity. It’s an essentially standard paranormal creeper, in many ways just shiny trash, but the deathly unsmiling tone of the film, matched with the high production value, especially the sleek cinematography from Ben Davis who photographs Vatican City in gorgeous, ominous ways, creates a tone of overwhelming skin-crawling danger. I fell into the film’s mood, matching its earnest approach with an unexpectedly earnest response. There’s a creeping sense of an invisible, evil spiritual threat that set my teeth grinding and my feet bouncing. It worked on me. Handsomely mounted and scarily serious, the film’s an effective freak-out.

Hot Lunch: SHARK NIGHT 3D

The appeal of Shark Night 3D is exactly at the level of watching attractive twenty-somethings walk around in bathing suits before getting devoured by special effects. It comes advertised as a PG-13 horror movie about college kids spending some of their summer at a remote beach house on a lake that is suddenly and confusingly full of sharks. You certainly can’t fault the movie for false advertising.

Director David R. Ellis brings us another horror movie cut like an action flick. His Final Destination 2 and even Snakes on a Plane benefit from the eventful buzz, the constant propulsive tension that he brings. (It’s no wonder that his best film is Cellular, his only pure actioner). In Shark Night 3D, as soon as college girl Sara (Sara Paxton) arrives in Louisiana with a group of vacationing college clichés (Dustin Milligan, Katharine McPhee, Chris Zylka, Alyssa Diaz, Joel David Moore, and Sinqua Walls) in route to her parents’ lake house, they get in a choppy boat chase with the scruffy local police officer (Donal Logue). They’re not in trouble; he just likes giving kids a hard time.

Now that the screenplay from Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg has established that this group of young people are staying in the middle of nowhere with only a goofy cop to watch out for them, it’s time for the sharks to start attacking. The sharks show up with all the regularity of action sequences and are shot in the zippy action style that the early boat chase sets the pattern for. The first victim is bitten while water skiing, sending the others into a bit of a panic. The attacks continue, escalating in their scope. It’s not long before a shark collides with a boat sending it malfunctioning into a dock where there is a large explosion that sends debris flying towards the audience.

The victims’ attempts to fight back or flee are presented in visually expansive ways. This is no close and creepy horror thriller. These people are trapped in the expanse of wilderness where you can attempt to flee by Jet Ski but you might not get very far. In addition to the sharks, the college kids are creeped out by skeevy locals (Chris Carmack, Joshua Leonard, and Jimmy Lee Jr.) who are incorporated into the chomping story quickly enough. The sharks in this movie are awfully stubborn things, leaping out of the water or swimming great distances just to bite someone. This being a PG-13 movie, their snacking just turns the water red, but there is enough quick-cut visceral impact to make quite clear the fate of these poor pieces of shark bait.

There’s not much to the movie, when all is said and done. It’s nothing more than a delivery device for attractive performers, low-level thrills and modestly effective B-movie baloney. There are some fun spills, some vaguely likable caricatures, and a handful of enjoyably predictable beats, nearly everything an earnest, underachieving, 30-years-too-late Jaws rip-off could be. The filmmakers didn’t set their goals very high and therefore managed to meet them. As a last weekend of summer time waster, it’s not entirely terrible. It’s not, strictly speaking, good, but “not entirely terrible” felt just good enough at the time.