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.

Eye of the Beholder: TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has little evil at first; or rather, it sets up a situation with no good reason to expect it. Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are two kindly small-town folk who eagerly drive deep into the woods for a much-needed vacation at a crumbling cabin that was sold cheap since its old inhabitant was allegedly some kind of crazed criminal. While out fishing one night, they’re startled by the sight of a pretty young woman (Katrina Bowden) preparing to swim. She’s just as startled as they are, so she ends up falling and hitting her head. Tucker and Dale rescue her and take her back to the cabin to nurse her back to health.

What these two nice guys don’t realize is that her friends are under the mostly false impression that she disappeared into the woods and was kidnapped by killer hillbillies or psychotic rednecks. The group of college kids she left behind plots to rescue her, but in the process creates only more and more misunderstandings. A particularly snotty frat boy classist (Jesse Moss) takes the lead and convinces one kid to sneak up to the cabin. As he does, Tucker is preparing to operate a chainsaw but instead gets attacked by a swarm of bees. So, around comes Tucker running with a chainsaw and flailing wildly, spooking the kids and reinforcing their preconceived notions. Oh, and the kid who was sneaking up ends up running in such a blind panic that he impales himself on a tree branch.

The college kids think they’re in a horror movie. After all, they’re on vacation camping in the woods and are all of a sudden in danger from the wilderness and from Those Who Are Not Like Them. It’s creepy to begin with, but scary stories around the campfire suddenly have suddenly appeared to become real. The audience, however, is in on the bloody joke. Tucker and Dale just wanted to have a nice weekend and are suddenly confronted with crazy kids running around, acting unexpectedly hostile, and getting killed in freak accidents. Tucker and Dale are the sweet innocents being terrorized. The college kids are the unwitting victimizers, the misunderstood monsters, hurting mostly themselves while making things very strange for these two nice guys.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a 90-minute riff on its central genre flip. First time director Eli Craig, who co-wrote with Morgan Jurgenson, keeps the energy high, reveling in his neat little trick of a plot in a knowing way. Wacky bloodshed is the name of the game, held up by an endless string of sudden surprises that show up out of the inherent inevitability in its double-barreled structure of miscommunications. Neither group can clearly understand what the other is up to simply because they are viewing the world as filtered through horror films and socioeconomic assumptions. The college kids are convinced that they’ve encountered kin of Leatherface or Jason. Tucker and Dale think they’re being terrorized by a suicide cult. They’re staring at each other across an artificial social divide.

It’s not exactly a one-joke movie, but that’s not far off. It has only one approach. It sets up innocent situations with potential for either understanding or senseless violence and then twists them up through increasingly unlikely mistakes into the worst-case scenarios until it ends with inadvertent carnage. The concept is funny and startling, but it wears out its welcome ever so slightly. It grows repetitive and more than a little predictable. But because Tudyk and Labine are so very charming and inherently likable, I remained involved in the increasingly harried plight of Tucker and Dale’s ill-fated vacation. Besides, it’s hard not to care when there’s some pathos to be found in the way that Dale has internalized the way society sees him, especially when he tells the girl they rescued that the whole situation they’ve found themselves in is his fault. “I should have known if a guy like me talked to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead,” he says. He and the filmmakers are fighting for the little guy arguing, however crudely and simply, that caricatures are people too.