Breasts, Blood and Ball-Biting: The Piranha 3D Review

     I've been to a few films in IMAX 3D (Avatar and the last Harry Potter come to mind). When I first heard about Piranha 3D, I figured that it wouldn't come to IMAX and I'd have to see it at the second best option, Clark's Pond. As I walked into the theater through the welcome rain, I was handed a relic from the past: the red and green 3D glasses I remember from my childhood. Safe to say I was quite confused; whenever I went to an IMAX 3D film, the glasses were always clear, like a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses. As we found our way to our seats, I was mainly concerned about the color and "pop" that you would find at an IMAX 3D theater. Luckily, I was proven wrong: once the words "Please Put on your 3D Glasses" covered the screen, Piranha 3D and the preluding movie trailers became an entertaining 3D escape that transported me into a world of laughably horrible acting, multidimensional bouncing breasts, severed penises and thousands of gallons of blood.
     I went to Cancun on spring break in college. The partying scenes in this movie were what I thought it would be like. Maybe we didn't hit the correct hotspots, but my time was spent with a life-threatening sunburn, shitty food and a lot of tits that were smothered in clothing. It's a hell of a lot different in this film. Breasts are exposed just for the hell of it, and they're even played for laughs at some points, such as the girl windsurfer who lands and skids across the water (the camera is an underwater view, so all you see are her funbags flying across the top of the screen). There's even a nude underwater lesbian sex scene that was intentionally filmed with its 3D value in mind. That's not to say there isn't something for the ladies: shirtless men are everywhere and even a penis that floats right in front of your face at one point. Don't get too excited: it's severed, bloody, and a piranha burps it up.

          3D has exploded over the past year. That tends to happen when the most successful movie in the history of cinema was filmed and intended to view in 3D. It's fairly safe to say that it's already somewhat descended in terms of monetary and technical value. A lot of films are post-converted, which means that they were not filmed in 3D, just changed during the editing process. The general consensus on this method is that it sucks. This year's Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender suffered in every way from this "post-converting". However, Piranha 3D  was filmed with 3D specifically in mind, and it shows. Many images pop out of the screen, and even that color didn't seem dull like in other 3D experiences that I have witnessed.
     A film with this intended audience needs to have tons and tons of blood and gore. It also needs original deaths that entertain (and sometimes disgust). This movie has plenty of both: bodies are dispatched in new and usually funny ways. A couple of my favorites involve the slicing of a topless woman's torso and watching it slowly fall off the lower body and a girls long hair getting caught in an outboard motor prop and watching her face and head get scalped. Blood spurts everywhere as young coeds get mangled one by one. At one point, that big motherfucker Ving Rhames rips an outboard off of a small boat and uses it as a weapon against the fish. A highlight of the film, for sure. There isn't a whole lot more to say: the acting is predictably terrible, breasts and body parts fly across and through the screen, gruesome deaths are right around every corner, and the 3D actually works pretty well most of the time. That's what I call     (B)     movie fun.