The Finest Flying Piranha Movie Ever Made

I've never seen the original Piranha, I'm not an authority on horror and James Cameron has renounced this film and repeatedly said he considers his first film The Terminator. Why did I choose to watch it? Because it has motherfucking flying piranhas in it.

When I heard that, my imagination started running around like a little kid, conjuring images that didn't even really have anything to do with flying piranhas.

My hopes for this film were through the roof. It almost got the point where the film had no chance to live up to my expectations. I imagined a huge ensemble of characters being introduced in the first scene, only to be eaten by GODDAMN FLYING PIRANHAS in the second scene.

They sort of do that, too. They introduce a huge host of characters and never go anywhere with them. Some of them die, some of them observe the climax from a distance and shrug, and some of them are last seen in the middle of the movie as if someone just forgot about them. I prefer my idea, though. As usual.

We're introduced to some lame characters who spend a lot of time not skipping rope and playing football with their new flying piranha neighbors. One of them is the android from Aliens and one of them is his son who gets his very own useless subplot.

Then the piranhas start eating houses and cars in a single bite and shooting rainbows from their eyes that make people explode into a bloody mist. Then one of them fuses with some busty, foreign chick so that her boobs can be fused to the piranha's gigantic exoskeleton. And then the piranhas start forming together to create a giant piranha and the US government calls in the Justice League to stop them but the Justice League can't stop them because Superman can fly, but is he a fucking piranha? The film ends when Lance Henriksen is crowned king of piranhas for no reason and they play a benefit concert with Aerosmith and then the piranhas fuse with the entire crowd and become bigger than the Earth.

Or at least I'll give James Cameron credit for maybe thinking that would be an awesome movie. Unfortunately, the stories I've heard have said that James Cameron wasn't terribly involved in production. In fact, I've heard a fellow named Ovidio G. Assonitis did most of the directing. It seems that Cameron (at most) filmed it, but was not involved in pre-production or editing and I can imagine the flying piranha charity drive was the first thing to go.

Sometimes I wonder if I get so bored during bad movies that I substitute entire plots in my head and come up with better movies to watch in my brain, sometimes pretending that what's on screen is part of my glorious brain movie. And that's exactly what happened during Piranha II: The Spawning. I was so busy pretending the piranhas were playing chess that I barely absorbed anything in this movie. And maybe it's because it was a shit movie, but I can imagine it was because I knew the piranhas could fly ahead of time and was heartbroken when all they did was nibble on your mother's Christmas ham.

The only thing that kept jarring me was the musical cues that announced the arrival of the piranhas every time they were on screen. In the future, when everything is digital. When our bicycles are digital. When our playing cards are digital. When our children are digital. And when those digital children clip those digital cards to their digital bikes and they make digital motorcycle noises to make the kids digitally cool. That is what that noise sounded like.

Other than that, the plot was stupid, the formula was stupid, it looks like it was shot in two weeks, the actors are atrocious and I don't want to think about it any more.

stupid/10

Eine Symphonie des Screaming Preteens

I've never read any of the Twilight books. My senior year of high school, some real nerd was nerding all over me and started telling me about how "badass" the book was and how it was full of "awesome" werewolves and vampires. I was totally disengaged and barely listened to him. People always shout the blurbs on the back of books at me and I tend to ignore them. It wasn't until about a year later that my exposure to Twilight was complete. When the film came out I suddenly realized the vanilla-scented stampede Stephanie Meyer had unleashed. I casually thumbed through the first book before trying to crush my head between the pages.

I suppose anyone can write a book, but Twilight is a carefully composed argument for a police state where someone like Stephanie Meyer would be sent to a Siberian gulag and made to mine for ice.

Twilight was a generally pretty boring film filled with people who were pretty first and actors second. I haven't seen it in a long time, but if I remember correctly it was a pretty bland, cookie-cutter script with some obvious mistakes (it was a romance and could have survived as such, but they threw in an antagonist at the end who had no connection to the real story of the film) and I don't even remember the rest.

You know what's the weirdest thing about New Moon? It's EXACTLY the same movie. Here's the story for the first film:

Lonely teenage girl, feeling abandoned, goes about her life and catches the eye of a gorgeous young man. After some pursuit, and some mysterious happenings, she discovers he's a supernatural creature. She feels like the most special little girl in the whole wide world for dating a monster so violent and dangerous that they've kept their own existence a secret. Unsurprisingly, the guy tries to sever ties when he realizes that he has a hard time controlling his supernatural urges (I smell some metaphor!). Lonely teenage girl gets upset and lonely again before proving her worth as a submissive lapdog. Meanwhile, her supernatural prom date is hunting a BAD supernatural monster that's killing hikers in the woods.

The only thing that makes this film's story even a little bit different from the previous film is that they continue to deal with last time's supernatural monster. Edward Cullen is probably in about 25 minutes of the two hour and ten minute film, but THAT'S OKAY, because in the meantime we're treated to Jacob Black, a young werewolf whose abs look like they just wandered off the cover of a romance novel and into an ad about the dangers of steroid use. The idea that the film tries to use to set it apart from the previous installment is Bella's choice between the brooding, boring, but very pretty Edward and the busty Jacob. Except actor Taylor Lautner is seventeen. And he put on thirty pounds of muscle in a less than nine months. If I were to guess what KIND of steroids he was using, I'd imagine it would be blue whale steroids with a rhinoceros steroid chaser.

I get that jean shorts will never go out of style and that shirt factories are a popular target for terrorist attacks, but Jesus Christ I got sick of him greasing his ass and rubbing it in the audience's face. I have seldom experienced more gratuity in the name of exploiting an actor's physique.

That's okay, but what really gets my goat about this series is Stephanie Meyer haphazardly throwing in religious aspects to, first of all, a story about mythical hellhounds and demons being reimagined as plush toys, but to what is borderline pornography. I suppose in a capitalist society we'll always run into people selling sex to preteens, but the Twilight series has never had any shame about it. It's that they have the audacity to then turn around and point to the fact that Bella isn't getting bulldozed by the demons that makes them morally repugnant. Parents buy the books for their nine-year-olds like they're math textbooks. But they won't let their children see a movie rated R for brief strong language.

Chris Weitz's direction is, as usual, disaffected and bored, sort of letting the action happen without adding any real visual flair.

But it's not like he didn't try.

Chris Weitz has unleashed some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen with his gaudy slow motion and blur effects. Sometimes I wanted to look away, but my sense of journalistic integrity latched my eyes to the screen. And that's the only time he injects the film with any kind of style (aside from an almost-good opening scene). The rest is static or cliched camera work, but when a fight scene starts, Weitz starts running around like a little puppy.

Nothing else in the series has changed. Kirsten Stewart is still a boring actress stuck in a role written specifically to keep her as boring and cipher-like as possible so that any little girl can imagine herself in her place. Same goes for Robert Pattinson, although he's arguably an even worse actor. He has an browline completely resistant to acting, but the filmmakers insist on showing it in closeup all the time as if to remind us that this kid has the emotional range of a character in a motion capture film. Special shout-out to Ashley Greene, who doesn't do much and isn't called upon to show if she's a good actor or even if she's a bad one, but who's as close as this film comes to casting a genuinely gorgeous person. Or at least someone who reacts well to the makeup effects.

It was boring the first time I saw this film when it was Twilight, but this time it's offensively boring. I wanted to fall asleep. I didn't even want to leave 2012 and I was sore for days because of the theater's conditions. I hope I can put myself in the hospital ahead of Eclipse, a film even director David Slade has essentially admitted that he hates and is doing because he's a young director who needs a sure-fire hit to boost his career.

2/10