The Piranha And The Damage Done

I'll tell you this: it's a topsy-turvy world we live in. I mean, who would've thought that Piranha 3-D's critical acclaim would outpace its box office appeal? But yet that hard-to-believe scenario has played out as Piranha 3-D (just Piranha according to the film's onscreen title but I'll keep refering to it as Piranha 3-D) currently sits at whopping 74% approval on Rotten Tomatoes while it looks to exit the box office Top Ten after just two weeks in theaters. Still, whatever money it's made is damn good for what amounts to a SyFy Channel Movie pimped out with 3-D. Add in the critical love, and it's all gravy.

I've been hot for this movie for ages. I mean, my first post on Piranha 3-D went up way back in May of 2008. Over two freakin' years ago! Go on, click here if you don't believe me. In my fevered anticipation, I gushed that Piranha 3-D had the potential to be "The Greatest Movie Ever." Given that, this should be my time to crow, or eat my cake, or whatever it is people do when their beliefs are vindicated. After all, I was on the Piranha 3-D bandwagon way, way before it was fashionable. The only problem I've got now is that, unlike the critical community at large, I didn't completely love the movie.

I'm not trying to be contrary - I'm not that guy who always likes to take the opposite stance on everything (honest!). And to be clear, I didn't hate the movie. I did enjoy it. I just didn't love it. This confused me at first so I saw it twice just to confirm my feelings but as it turned out my first reaction was unchanged. I thought the movie was good for a sick chuckle or two but was otherwise unimpressive. It's just too...wait for it...dumb. That statement is supposed to be greeted by shouts of "What did you expect, ass-hat?" but, please, hear me out. Piranha 3-D is a movie that tries to make every scene about boobs and blood and while that sounds like it should work, it kind of doesn't.

My five-year-old son watches a show called Sid the Science Kid and in one episode, Sid wonder why he can't just eat cake all the time, for every meal. The answer, of course, is that a diet of nothing but cake will make him sick to his stomach on top of not getting him the nutrition he needs. And that's what Piranha 3-D is like. I didn't regret the time I spent watching it but I couldn't quite celebrate it as being the Bestest Time Ever, either. On my second viewing, as I debated halfway through whether or not to skip out early and get on with more pressing concerns, I flashed on Franklin's words from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): "If I have any more fun today, I don't think I can take it!"

All bitching aside, my issues with the movie - characters that range from bland to grating, the lewd, leering treatment of women, the often murky underwater photography, the headache-inducing post-production 3-D conversion - might've been given a pass if the climactic spring break massacre had delivered as promised. This all-out feeding frenzy - as spring breakers are devoured by marauding piranha - has been reported to be the bloodiest scene in film history and while it may well be, in terms of gallons, it failed to impress this gorehound.

Call me someone who's too particular about their bloodbaths but people flailing around in red water doesn't impress me. I wanted to see some classic gore gags and on that count, I only saw two. One, where a girl's long hair gets caught in the blades of a boat motor and when the motor is started, her face is immediately torn off. And the other being when a girl is being carried out of the water by two rescuers and her body splits in two. Both of those moments boasted the kind of grisly effects-work I was hoping to see more of - gore gags where I couldn't immediately tell whether they were practical or CG. Obviously CG bits like the death of Eli Roth's wet T-shirt contest judge - as his head is crushed between two boats - or the death of two girls that are split Ghost Ship-style by a whiplashing steel cable were just too CG for my taste. CG gore can work sometimes but here, it wasn't effective.

When people say that Piranha 3-D is a perfect example of how B-movies used to be, I think that's my biggest gripe with the reception this movie's gotten. Sorry, but this isn't how B-movies used to be. The best exploitation movies were always about more than just exploitation. Certainly, the original Piranha (1978) was a smart movie that didn't treat its audience like twelve-year-old boys looking for jack-off material. Strange as it sounds, when I watched Piranha 3-D I had the vague feeling of being insulted. I give it a passing grade but I know the genre can produce much better films. I'm not going to pull a James Cameron here and throw Piranha 3-D under the bus but 3-D, 2-D, or otherwise, Piranha 3-D is mired in adolescent nonsense. It manages to make Roger Corman's sleaziest film, 1980's Humanoids from the Deep (a movie about fish-men coming out of the ocean to rape and impregnate women) look classy.

For me, George Romero's latest zombie opus, Survival of the Dead (2009), represents the kind of B-movie that I grew up on, the kind that continue to stoke my love of fantastic cinema. It's a little ragged, a little clumsy, but there's no mistaking that it has heart. This isn't cookie-cutter filmmaking. Romero is being free-wheeling, he's having fun and as he's always done, he also brings some genuine personality to the table. His socio-political concerns have been criticized as becoming too heavy-handed as he's gotten older and I don't disagree with that but when I watch Survival of the Dead, I like that I'm watching a movie made by someone who treats me as a viewer with some respect. It's not a polished production but there's a sense of soul to it. Those are the kind of genre films that keep you around for the long haul. On the other hand, movies with CG piranha fighting over severed CG penises can only sustain you for so long.

Only for about 88 minutes, in fact.

A Myriad Of Malevolent Mirrors

Last summer's Mirrors was touted as "The Horror Event of the Summer!" but even in a summer that included competition as weak as the much-disparaged The Happening (a film I haven't seen myself yet) few felt director Alexandre Aja's film lived up to that hype. But I took an instant shine to this silly movie when I saw it in theaters last August. So much so that I included it on my top ten list for 2008. Yeah, it probably didn't belong there but damn it, I'll never stand in shame at my preference for any film - especially not in a world where some people think it isn't ridiculous to like the Saw movies. But with Mirrors now on DVD, I wanted to see how well it stood up to a second look.

Well, while I didn't discover that it had gotten any better, I did find that I still liked it just as much. Kiefer Sutherland as the lead helps a lot. As Ben Carson, an ex-cop who was forced to retire from the force after he accidentally killed someone in the line of duty and who is also dealing with a separation from his wife and children, there's ample opportunity for Sutherland to get volatile. He snaps into anger mode on a dime, and I like that. He does pissed-off better than anyone else. I could watch a whole movie of Sutherland losing his shit with people and, with Mirrors, I guess I already have. He even gets up in a nun's face, threatening her at gunpoint, and that's great stuff. Of course, all these encounters begin with Sutherland trying to be reasonable and even-tempered. But there's a short clock on that approach and as soon as a conversation turns the least bit difficult, he unleashes.

When he's not exploding in a blind rage, Ben is all alone in the torched department store where he works as a night guard. And what a place this is! When it comes to ghost stories and haunted house movies, I'm a sucker for a great location and Mirrors is a winner on that count. The set design is stellar and watching Sutherland exploring these enormous, burned-out rooms with just a flashlight crossing over ash-covered mannequins, display cases, and gigantic mirrors is totally satisfying to me. What can I say - I'm an easy customer.

And after so many PG-13 remakes of Asian horror films, I took pleasure in seeing one that went out of its way to deliver R-rated supernatural splatter - even if it wasn't in the film's best artistic interests. There's the potential for an eerie, suggestive ghost story here that Aja blindly runs roughshod over, turning Mirrors literally into a bloody mess - but that only made it more endearing to me.The already infamous death of Amy Smart's character is a hideous show-stopper, for instance, but what's especially great about it is that it makes absolutely No Sense. Of all the ways for one's mirror image to inflict death, to tear your lower jaw off (!) is - pardon the phrase - a real stretch. I took it as Aja paying fanboy tribute to the 'face-ripping' scene from Poltergeist - a scene that plays out, of course, in a mirror (with all its influences, Mirrors is a jagged collection of cinematic shards). And Mirrors' finale, in which Ben has to fight for his life against a leaping, lunging horror hag straight out of Army of Darkness, is the way more horror movies should end. Just when it looks like the movie's over - bring in a horror hag. It doesn't matter what story you've been telling up to that point, because only a jerk wouldn't want to see a horror hag. Especially one that can jump straight from the floor up to the ceiling and crawl along the side of walls.

I understand that these may not be solid grounds to praise a movie but that's fine. What we like is an inescapable reflection of who we are, even if that reflection is sometimes cracked.

Mirrors

Director Alexandre Aja's supernatural shocker Mirrors is likely to earn plenty of derisive hoots from both mainstream reviewers and the genre press. But I hope I'll have some company on the other side of the looking glass when I say that I got a really big kick out of this. If you're only going to see one bad movie about evil mirrors this year, please make it Mirrors because no one else is going to top it, believe me.

Aja first made a name for himself with his French shocker Haute Tension (2003) then successfully made the leap to the US with his remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). Both of those movies earned their share of accolades from the horror community but neither film quite did it for me personally. Yes, the violence was spectacular - but on both counts what should've been tense, gritty, close-to-the-bone tales badly unravelled. Mirrors, on the other hand, is a crock right from the start. To me, that makes it more of a party. This is a movie that can only get more and more inane. And by God, it does.

As Mirrors unfolds, it's clear that Aja intended this to be the premiere evil mirror movie, the final word on this subject (watch your back, Poltergeist III!) and anyone who wants to take a foolish dream like that all the way to the wall deserves to have me on their side. There's not a lick of an apologetic tone here. Aja is 100% committed to making the best scary mirror movie he can. He doesn't even want to stop at mirrors - any reflective surface is a potential way for evil to find its way into our world. In hindsight, Aja probably should've reined the screenplay (co-written with his regular partner Gregory Levasseur) in a bit and done a better job of establishing a clearer set of rules for how the evil presence in his film operates. But then if he had, this movie would've been a little less cracked (heh!) than it is and that's not a trade-off I'd have been willing to see. Mirrors' story is a complete pile of nonsense, but it's an entertaining pile of nonsense. It's the warped funhouse mirror reflection of a potentially better movie. Or possibly vice-versa. With mirrors, it's so hard to tell.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as ex-NYPD detective Ben Carson, who was dropped from the force after accidentally shooting a fellow officer and who now works as a night watchman at an abandoned, fire-gutted department store (stunningly depicted by production designer Joseph Nemec's sets) while temporarily crashing on his sister's couch. In the meantime, he's trying to mend his relationship with his estranged wife (played by Paula Patton) and their two kids. So this is the worst possible time for Ben to be dealing with a supernatural force trying to push its way into our world, using him as an unwilling conduit.

Had anyone else played Ben, Mirrors might've lost a good deal of its appeal. But for those, like me, who never tire of watching Sutherland explode ("Goddammit!"), this is gold. Some will write off Sutherland's performance here as a lazy continuation of his Jack Bauer shtick but for me, even if that's all he's doing, that's cool because there's no one else around to do it. I don't know why seeing Kiefer Sutherland in pissed off mode is so enjoyable to me, it just is. Mirrors wouldn't be half as much fun without him in the way that the original Amityville Horror (1979) wouldn't have been half as much fun without James Brolin. And while Sutherland's got some horrendous dialogue to deliver here, he never seems put out or embarrassed to be saying any of the dumb things he's asked to say - and that makes him a stand-up guy in my book. Aja's lucky to have him in his corner.

Initially, Aja probably meant for Mirrors to be a Shining-esque chiller, with a more psychological brand of scares than he'd gone for previously, but apparently he couldn't help but cover his ass with some gratuitous violence, which KNB's Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger deliver in spades. This was definitely a smart move on Aja's part as Mirrors' nastier highlights leave a strong impression. And Aja also can't help but ratchet up the action in the finale, which is totally jarring but in a good way. Sutherland's final throwdown with the evil behind the mirror might blow any chance of taking this movie seriously out of the water but that shipped had already sailed. If Mirrors' climax had been a low-key affair it would've made me think that Aja didn't really know what kind of movie he was making. Thankfully he totally did and that means we get to see Sutherland do his best Bruce Campbell as he battles what looks like the pit hag from Army of Darkness (it wouldn't have been out of place at all to hear Sutherland say "This is my boomstick!"). I also liked the film's coda, which delivers a hokey but satisfying Twilight Zone-ish sting.

Supernatural horror is clearly not Aja's forte, he's more of a visceral guy (next year's Piranha 3-D is going to destroy!) but after years of seeing one PG-13 remake of a J-Horror film after another pedal the same soft scares, Mirrors (a loose remake of the 2003 South Korean film Into the Mirror) automatically earns my gratitude for telling the likes of Pulse, Shutter and One Missed Call where to shove it. This may be a silly movie, for sure, but I was thoroughly entertained by it. A reflection of my own loose standards? Maybe. But when I looked into Mirrors, I liked what I saw.