Piranha (2010)

Cast: Elisabeth Shue, Jerry O'Connell and Richard Dreyfuss

Writers: Pete Goldfinger, Josh Stolberg

Director: Alexandre Aja

Well as many may know, I'm not a fan of remakes. I am a fan of Alexandre Aja and he proves more and more that he will not sully and destroy a classic with an ass backwards remake and that's what I love about him. If only Hollywood would actually let him work on his own original ideas rather than them just trying to use him to re-market classics for bank.Guess they never really paid much mind to "High Tension" or maybe Aja would be taking more seriously for his original work in France, where horror seems to be on much higher demand and has a ballsy mainstream market. Not to mention the mainstream market of other regions as well that put American mainstream horror to shame. With that I will share my thoughts on Aja's take of the classic "Piranha".

The film is about an earthquake that causes the bottom of a lake to split open revealing a cavern where prehistoric piranha have been surviving for centuries by breeding and feeding off of each-other. Just in time for spring break, these piranhas are unleashed, hungry and pissed off and already to make blood flow. Elisabeth Shue stars as the sheriff of this nice wholesome town turned red, and does her best to try and warn all the young, drunken, horny college kids that their lives are at stake and of course the don't listen until it's too late.

The plot of course, like the classic is cool, because things like this can happen and is how they have found certain prehistoric fish and so on. I thought it had good pace, the right amount of humor and was definitely bloody. Some my argue the fact of the over use of CGI, but have to keep in mind it was meant to be a 3D movie and even the use of animatronics wouldn't give these little suckers the motion they had.

The cast was good and to be perfectly honest I had no clue who was in this film so seeing Elizabeth Shue, Jerry O'Connell and Ving Rhames was cool along with cameo appearances by Richard Dreyfus, Christopher Lloyd and Gianna Michaels (Drools). Of course with this being a Hollywood film you have decent acting and the characters aren't to bad either. Everything seems to mold well around the idea of spring break and at least the locals aren't stupid hicks town peoples like most films tend to treat small towns people.

The gore is plenty, nothing to extreme or explicit but you get blood and gore as you would expect from a film filled with piranhas eating spring breakies. You have a lot of water chaos, limbs, blood, guts and silicon. It's a nice little blood bath and it sure is fun to watch and I wish I could have seen it in 3-D. There's even a few humorous death scenes aside from the silicone that I got a great laugh from. And to all those that Hate Eli Roth, he gets a nice little death also.I forgot to mention his cameo as well, and still wonder why people hate him so much. Well the blood and gore is there and is sure to entertain quite a few people that just like to jump into a tank of piranhas and be eaten alive.

Overall, I enjoyed this film, it was fun and didn't focus on stupid nonsense that had nothing to do with the film, like some films tend to do. It stood on base with the story of the piranhas and it stood on base with the main characters and those at spring break ultimately making it well written and well directed. It's definitely one of the best remakes Ive seen, but when it comes to the best remake ever, hands down it goes to John Carpenter's "The Thing". But even though it's not the best of all time it doesn't mean that "Piranha can't get five victims out of five.

5/5