MOVIES: 'Piranha 3D' latest crunch and munch movie
The monster movie is a Hollywood staple, and while it may instantly bring to mind such rampaging, titanically-sized beasts as King Kong, Godzilla or H. R. Giger’s aliens, it is actually a remarkably broad and fluid genre, encompassing just about every sort of creature, real and imaginary. One defining characteristic of monster movies seems to be that the monster at the center of the story is frequently famished. And its favorite meal is us.
Monster movies, also known affectionately as creature features, encompass horror, science fiction and fantasy. Sometimes the monsters in question are seen as objects of pity, set on a destructive course they did not choose (often a metaphor for humanity’s own destructive impulses — the result of science gone awry, for example), while other times they are malevolence incarnate, a force of evil to be annihilated without pity.
Ever since “King Kong,” with its primordial island of extinct wonders, cemented its place as the king of traditional monster movies (the Japanese doubtless may contend with that interpretation), prehistoric reptiles became all the rage—most of them given life by stop motion wizard Ray Harryhausen. There was “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” about a 100- million-year-old Rhedosaurus that is unthawed from the Arctic ice by a nuclear bomb test and turns to New York City as his own personal snacking grounds. Others included “It Came from Beneath the Sea” and “The Giant Behemoth.”
Very often, these creature features were little more than B movies. As censorship constraints were loosened in the late ‘60s and the Production Code gave way to our modern rating system, the golden age of exploitation films—low quality B movies that combined lurid, vulgar subject matter with relentless violence and sensationalist titillation—began in earnest, churned out as quickly and cheaply as their guerilla cast and crew could make them.
In 1968, a new subgenre was born with the advent of George Romero’s zombie flick, “Night of the Living Dead.” Unlike many modern zombie films, which seem to smooth over the undead’s fleshly appetites, when the zombie’s uttered, “Braaaaaaaaains,” you knew you’d just become the main course. Not to be outdone, vegetation got in on the action too with “The Little Shop of Horrors,” a farce about a florist’s assistant who nurtures a giant plant that feeds on human flesh and blood.
In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” about a Great White shark who dines on bikini-clad beachgoers, turned the B movie into an A class hit and launched the summer blockbuster. Three years later, Roger “The King of B Movies” Corman produced his “Jaws” parody — instead of a single massive shark, he gave the world thousands of ravenous “Piranha.”
“Piranha” also continued a tradition birthed in the 1950s, the so-called Eco-terror film. These stories typically involve creatures that for one reason or another (often some external, human influence) have been altered from their natural state into something far larger and more aggressive than evolution intended. While the 1050 atomic testing gave rise to the most famous Eco-terror film, “Godzilla,” there were many others including “Them!,” about ants transformed by radiation into automobile-sized eating machines, and “Tarantula,” about the everyday challenges of a house-sized spider who just wants to fit in. “Night of the Lepus” featured mutated, carnivorous killer rabbits that, despite the filmmakers’ best efforts, proved nonfrightening because they were, well, rabbits. (Where’s Monty Python when you need them?)
Soon the floodgates were opened for films that had just enough social commentary — corporate avarice, environmental pollution, military incompetence — to justify buckets full of blood and dismemberment. And often not even that. Overly familiar plots simply substituted one hungry creature for another, including “Alligator,” “Grizzly,” “The Pack,” “Razerback,” “Day of the Animals” which transforms ordinary house pets into starved ogres, “Frog-g-g!,” “Arachnophobia,” “The Swarm,” “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and the overt “Jaws” rip-offs “Great White,” “Orca,” “Monster Shark,” Tintorera” and “Tentacles.”
More recently, Steven Spielberg revisited the monster movie with a technological twist in “Jurassic Park,” in which dino DNA is used to recreate numerous species of terrible lizards which naturally escape from their cages and order out, human style. “Tremors” featured subterranean wormlike creatures which lived underground. In “Anaconda” we were food for giant snakes, in “Lake Placid” it’s prehistoric crocodiles, and in “Deep Blue Sea,” yep, you guessed it, more sharks.
Perhaps the most recent examples of the Eco-terror monster movie was the excellent 2006 South Korean film, “The Host,” about a mutated amphibian that lives in the sewers and dines on tourists, the claustrophobic “Descent” in which female spelunkers fall victim to hungry cave dwelling humanoids, and the campy insto-classic, “Snakes on a Plane,” about…well, you can figure it out.
The small screen is certainly not without its contributions. Turn on the SyFy Channel these days, and it seems every other original movie is a throwback to these enduring cult classics with names like “Bats: Human Harvest,” “Dinocroc vs. Supergator,” “Dinoshark,” “Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep,” “Mega Snake” and “Mongolian Death Worm.” And what is the Discovery Channel’s ever-popular “Shark Week” but a more respectable way for us to enjoy treacherous titillation in the name of education?
There won’t be any reviews of this weekend’s release of “Piranha 3D” (no relation to the Corman version, except in spirit), because the studio behind it, Dimension Films, has decided the less critical buzz the better. This is both an understandable and a bewildering choice. Understandable because the entire plot boils down to scantily clad coeds on spring break becoming dinner for ravenous fish released from an ancient hibernation — not exactly Shakespeare. But also bewildering because, well, with a name like “Piranha 3D,” who’s going into it for any other reason than to see three-dimensional fish make soggy mincemeat of their human prey? Of course the film is going to be terrible. That’s a given. But as many of these so-bad-they’re-good films prove, sometimes things that are terrible can also be a whole lot of fun.
“Piranha 3D opens today at Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark, Hollywood and Tinseltown.
