Friday, August 20, 2010

By popular demand...

(This already short review was trimmed to fit the page. The original cut, for what it's worth...)

Piranha 3D (18 cert, 88 min)

The suspense is as skimpy as the swimwear in this shameless 3D remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 Jaws spoof, directed by French gore specialist Alexandre Aja. The presence of Kelly Brook, who acquits herself fine, typifies an excessively guilty bit of Friday-night trash — it wants to have its breasts and eat them. It’s spring break at a lake in Arizona, and a minor quake unleashes prehistoric gnashers on an unsuspecting parade of partying hotties, under the concerned eye of Elisabeth Shue’s sassy sheriff. Richard Dreyfuss and Christopher Lloyd have fun cameos, but Aja’s lazy direction and reliance on tawdry digital body trauma makes the movie more of a gloating endurance test than an actual good time: it’s quite leering enough before Eli Roth turns up.

1 comment:

Guy Lodge said...

Wow, I've never successfully initiated "popular demand" before. This was entirely worth the bother for the "have its breasts and eat them" line -- space constraints or not, what were the subs thinking?