Piranha 3-D

The story of the remake-quel Piranha is another tongue-in-cheek variation on the Jaws template: a small town reliant on spring-break tourism dollars is slow to protect nubile co-eds when a seismic shift releases hungry, sabre-toothed fish into their lake. But after a lengthy build-up filled with gratuitous Richard Dreyfuss and 3-D vomit effects, the last half-hour of Alexandre Aja’s horror comedy is one of the most impressively sustained instances of “delivering the goods” in recent film history. Of course, “the goods” in this case include porn-star breasts, vomited penises, a Jerry O’Connell tour de force, and a veritable blood orgy of viciously complicated deskinnings and delimbings, so it’s all relative. As a movie buff with no special interest in the horror genre, I both had a blast watching Piranha and hope to never see it or its oncoming parade of sequels ever again.