Elizabeth Shue seems like a fish out of water in this T&A gore fest
Graphic violence and mounds of T&A are driven to a new high (or low depending your point of view) in this deliberately over-the-top horror flick about what happens when a geologic fissure opens beneath an Arizona resort lake and unleashes a swarm of flesh-rending prehistoric piranha — during spring break, of course.
Composed like any number of slasher flicks, this one attempts to reshuffle the deck by using digital 3-D (for which you’ll have to pay an additional fee) to push naked young women, severed body parts, buckets of blood and gnashing teeth into the audience’s face.
What story there is concerns a teenage boy named Jake (Steven R. McQueen), who is hoping to take advantage of all the licentious action but winds up being tapped by his mom (Elizabeth Shue), who happens to be the local sheriff, to baby-sit his little sister and her friend.
Jake’s big conflict arises when a “Girls Gone Wild”-style video producer (Jerry O’Connell) hires him to find secluded locations for his latest nudie show. After a local girl (Jessica Szohr) who Jake is crazy about gets hired as one of the producer’s “models,” he decides he has to go along in order to watch over her while also making sure the kids are taken care of elsewhere. Playboy model Kelly Brook is another one of models on board too.
In the meantime, his mom the sheriff is investigating a mysterious killing involving a man named Matt (Richard Dreyfuss, in a ham-fisted reference to his “Jaws” character). That’s also when a team of geologists show up to look into an underwater tremor and discover that it has opened a channel to a huge cavern where ancient piranha have been trapped for millions of years, information we learn from a local fish expert played by Christopher Lloyd.
When the fish are turned loose on the spring break revelers, the action turns bloody and very gruesome.
Shue hasn’t been seen much in movies recently. One of her last appearances was in the hilarious “Hamlet 2,” which was shot in Albuquerque. Here, she’s not bad, but is clearly overqualified to be in a movie that essentially has her either being drooled over by horny frat boys or doing a lot of stunt-type work as she tries to rescue horribly mangled young people from a piranha feeding frenzy.
One thing to note is that a lot of the graphic violence is twistedly played for laughs, which means if you’re part of the narrowly defined target audience for this kind of movie, you’ll probably find it somewhat entertaining. If not, be warned. The extremely graphic violence and exploitive attitudes toward women is more vicious than the fish depicted in this movie.
And, speaking of those fish, according to scientific research, the image of a swarm of piranhas devouring humans or animals is a myth. “In fact,” according to COSMOS Magazine, “the little fish are so fearful of human contact that while (biologist Anne) Magurran and (Brazilian researcher Helder) Queiroz were studying wild-caught fish in a tank, they had to erect screens to stop the fish hyperventilating — flapping their gill flaps more rapidly, indicating stress — every time the researchers came too close.”
So there.
“Piranha 3-D” is rated R for sequences of strong bloody horror violence and gore, graphic nudity, sexual content, language and some drug use. It is showing at the Storyteller Cinema. Call (575) 758-9715 for show times or visit www.transluxmovies.com.
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