Reading over the reviews for this film have gotten to me. The negative reviews, delivered by the brandy snifterin’ know-n-so’s of the blogerati could not be helped, but what has irritated me the most are the “man of the people” Joe “Bob” Briggs-types who, while still granting a positive review, feel the need to berate anyone who would enjoy a film like this as a “dumb teenage male.” I will have you know that I am somewhere between only one and two of those things (depending on which ex-professor/girlfriend you ask) and I enjoyed the hell out of this film.

Piranha 3D is the first 3D film I’ve ever watched in a theatre. I skipped out on My Bloody Valentine because I was going through a bad brake-up at the time and didn’t need to be reminded that everyone else had someone. I boycotted Clash of the Titans for their abuse of robotic owls. And I said “no” to Avatar after being burned by the first direct-to-video sequel of Ferngully. I think 3D is a pointless bauble fearfully adhered to a medium in hopes of making the years between Christopher Nolan’s Batman films worth living. It costs too much to make, too much to project, and (if Sony has their way) too much to veg out to at home.

My original goal was to boycott the movement until it inevitably collapses under the weight of its own production costs, but I knew that they’d eventually cull together a project just stupid enough for me to ironically go to. Step Up 3D was a strong contender, but after watching the Funny or Die video for Piranha 3D I knew that it would be the one. If I was going to pay near-double for a cosmetic revamp of 1950’s schlock technology I wanted to be assured that it would be used to it’s fullest. What follows is a possibly spoiler laden list of things that I giggled at as they came “out of the screen!”

A beer bottle, some vomit, an underwater tree branch, an incandescent fish egg, someone shooting keg foam out like it was from their penis, a penis, a piranha coming as close to winking at the camera as CG would allow, a wet t-shirt contest, a motor ripped off the back of a boat being used as a handheld weapon, the upper half of a woman’s body, a pair of silicon breast implants, a canal, Panama.

Do you think these sound like shameful wastes of William Friese-Greene’s revolutionary stereoscopic technology? Neither do I.

And I know what you’re thinking. “But wait, with all of those ridiculous sight gags and the promise of over the top blood and boobies how are they going to fit in the environmental messages and well-defined character arcs the genre is known for?” They don’t! That’s the genius of it. Piranha 3D is on a 90 minute laser focused mission to gross and boner you into an oblivion and they wouldn’t dream of wasting your time like that. (Leave that to the eggheads over at SyFy)

Now that I think of it, there isn’t even really a story here. It’s just a sequence of scenes lifted from the outline of the first Jaws film (long underwater exploratory dive, “Everybody get out of the water!” scene, alcohol fueled bonding session between folks on a boat, giant explosion at the last second to save the day) all of which improved by the fact that piranhas are everywhere. It’s like an over sexualized Jaws on crank. Which may not have worked so well for Pamela Anderson’s remake of Casablanca, but she never thought of bringing Matt Hooper out of retirement and Doc Brown back to the present, now did she?

Piranha 3D is truly the Jaws of its time. And understand that I don’t say that in the same trivializing manner that every other reviewer have intended. No, I mean it in an entirely different trivializing way.

While Jaws was a masterful work of character and suspense that chose to turn a string of technical disasters into an unrelenting tone of dread and mystery, Piranha 3D is a film made for the early-twenty-somethings of today that don’t put up with that shit. This is a film for the Latter-Day MTV Generation who are shocked that there used to be music videos on during the day and can admit that Parental Control, while a lot of fun, doesn’t hold a candle to Room Raiders. This is a film for the show-me-now impetuous nature of our thong wearing ritalin junkie youth who consider Scream an old-school classic. And as much as they may enjoy the cruder and more topless portions of the film, old cynics like me get to watch them being disembowled by the razor sharp maws of prehistoric killing machines.  Everyone wins!

It is one of those rare cross-generational oddities like Pee-Wee Herman or Sponge Bob that can simultaneously operate on a level for the infantilized while offering a meta over-joke for sad sacks like myself who can experience the true emotional catharsis that comes from a jackass on an overturned jetski gets Piranha’d in the face.

Ps. We don’t use a rating system around here. Just watch the fucking movie.