Piranhas of the 21st century

3D horror film by Alexander Azha on Moscow screens

There are films for which the 3D format is strictly contraindicated; there are those who sweep the fashion fad from their faces with an ungeneral expression; and finally, there are paintings that feel like a fish in water in the three-dimensional universe. “Piranha” is just one of the latter. In fact, special glasses were invented precisely in order to watch through them how a busty girl in a bikini was instantly nibbled to the bone by a school of carnivorous fish. In the coastal zone of Lake Victoria, at the end of summer, there is a clear overabundance of such girls - twenty thousand anxious youngsters have gathered in protected areas for the summer festival, who are going to spend the last days of the holidays in a cycle of water splashes, beer intoxication and total toplessness. But it is precisely at this time that a tectonic shift occurs at the bottom of the lake, as a result of which fossil piranhas come to the surface from the prehistoric “lake under the lake”, snapping their jaws predatorily, and the waters turn scarlet. The local sheriff and part-time single mother Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) is trying to somehow rectify the situation. But she soon has to leave the main battlefield in order to rush to the rescue of her loved ones - her weakling son Jake (Steven R. McQueen) and a couple of different-sex kids find themselves in completely inappropriate company on the yacht of adult film producer Derrek Jones (Jerry O'Connell ), which crashes near the center of the fault. And although in Victoria it is strictly prohibited to kill fish with dynamite, in the current situation an exception has to be made.

Thirty-two-year-old Parisian Alexandre Aja, who, having moved to Hollywood, congenially remade American ("The Hills Have Eyes") and Korean ("Mirrors") classic horror films, this time also relied on a kind of classic - "Piranha" of 1978, bungled Joe Dante under the direction of Roger Corman for the three pennies allotted in such cases and which nevertheless had a certain and well-deserved success. In the best traditions, Azha was going to invite both Dante and James Cameron (who once made his debut with the sequel to the film Dante) to play cameo roles, who were supposed to portray captains teaching youngsters the basics of water safety, but somehow it didn’t work out. However, there were some iconic cameos. The first victim of the toothy fossils (and in general the first person to appear on screen) turns out to be none other than Richard Dreyfuss, who played the once expert on large predatory fish Matt Hooper in “Jaws”: here his character is also called Matt and he purrs under his breath Irving King’s song “Show Me the Way Home,” which was sung by Spielberg’s hunters on board the schooner “Orca” (however, thanks to the forces of domestic dubbing, the hit tune turned into a hard-to-distinguish muttering, and it is not easy to identify it). The mad scientist, who once identified the scaled creatures as seemingly extinct predators two million years ago, is played by Christopher Lloyd - like Doc from Back to the Future, who betrayed physics with ichthyology. The ringleader of the wet T-shirt competition, whose head splits on the pier with a coconut crack at the end, was Hostel director Eli Roth, and in the climactic beach massacre scene, a trained eye will be able to discern the chic forms of porn stars Ashlyn Brooke and Jeanne Michaels among the bloody bodies. It is the latter that look most appropriate in the context of the film - in essence, the newly-minted “Piranhas” are not cinema in its purest form, but a kind of fairground attraction, and deliberately of the lowest standard, a modern high-tech analogue of the “magic lantern” through which the most respectable artists were shown at fairs. all kinds of obscenity to the public. A complete set of guignol joys: here there is just nudity (including the notorious “frontal nudity”), and a second later the same, but in combination with streams of ketchup in the tradition of Herschel Gordon Lewis and lovingly crafted dummies of unevenly chewed off limbs, and as the pinnacle of style - falling out directly at the audience from the screen, Mr. Jones's manhood, snatched off to the very root and half-digested in a fish stomach, of which he was quite rightly proud until the last moment. The story is deliberately emasculated from the minimum meaning, the new “Piranhas” do not even try, like the original, to lay claim to the slightest social pathos - if in the original source the fish arranged a bloodbath for two-legged people due to a government experiment that got out of control, then here it is impossible in what is happening Blame even the usually trouble-free American military in such cases. Of course, from the not just skilled, but also truly capable Azha, one could theoretically expect an action that is a little more elegant and subtle (even within the framework of the genre), but, on the other hand, where it is subtle, it usually breaks. And in the hemoglobin brew, concentrated to the limit, thickening and coagulating before our eyes, flooding the white sheet of the screen, it is impossible to detect “a single break” with all the desire.

Stanislav F. ROSTOTSKY