At a time when 3D cinema, which has a reputation tainted by years of gimmicky use, is fighting to gain critical acceptance as a valid cinematic format, Piranha 3D comes along and not only embraces the gimmick but does so proudly. Some will errantly take the film seriously and present it as an example of 3D's aesthetic criminality. But director Alexandre Aja doesn’t care. He sets out to make his movie as ridiculous as possible, using in-your-face 3D techniques as but an extension of the pervasive ridiculousness found most in its stream of gratuitous gore and nudity. If you go to a movie that has “3D” as part of its title, you’d be dumb to expect high art, anyway.

It’s Spring Break 2010, or, as most characters in this movie would probably put it, “IT’S SPRING BREAK TWO THOUSAND TEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!” This means that at the small town of Lake Victoria, thousands of college-age kids are gathering to drink beer on boats parked just off the shore, gyrate absurdly, and yell things that call into question the sophistication of our educational system, all while wearing zero to two articles of clothing. Due to some astronomically bad luck, it is also at exactly this time that a fissure opens at the bottom of the lake, releasing swarms of prehistoric piranhas. How have the dinosaur-age piranhas survived this long cut off from the rest of the world? Cannibalism, the town’s aquatic life expert explains, not that that makes any sense. Anyway, they’re apparently just as excited by the current state of the Earth as the college kids are but not because they feel the need to display their fitness for mating. No, it’s because they are hungry. Now the Spring Breakers who came out to see flesh are going to see a lot more of that flesh than they want.

The gore and the nudity are constantly competing for screen time in Piranha 3D, but the gore definitely wins. This is a film that tries to be as bloody as possible, just for kicks. In this movie you see masses of panicked individuals chopped up by a propeller, naked torsos sliced in half by free-flying cables, and plenty of limbs eaten to the bone. It is fitting that gore-maestro Eli Roth makes a cameo in the film. Something tells me he wrote his own death scene.

Occasionally, however, the movie does too good of a job at the gore and not so much at keeping it funny. When one woman gets her hair caught in a propeller and is left screaming “My hair! My hair!” in desperation, for a prolonged period of time, barely able to keep her face above the water, and is finally put out of her misery by a means that involves her face being ripped off of her skull, I find myself more disturbed than amused. Screaming is fine, gore is fine, and the combination is fine, but when the screaming goes from fear to dismay, the situation becomes real, and the gore is no longer a visual dynamic but is the signifier of a lost life. If that statement sounds like a real downer, it accurately reflects the effect of a notable minority of Piranha 3D’s scenes. Then again, there are those who think Hostel is hilarious.

There are also blatant gross-out moments that aren't as bloody as the rest but that aim to make us laugh at the sheer fact that someone would shove such imagery at an audience in 3D. The first of these involves a character vomiting directly at the camera in slow-motion. Another involves two piranha fighting over a severed penis, followed by one of them swallowing it whole, swimming off screen, and swimming back into the frame to show us as it burps the mangled organ back into the water. It’s the extreme fictional version of watching a YouTube video of people being kicked in the groin. Laughter at these things is, for whatever reason, natural. With the few times the movie opts for this type of humor over profuse gore, it counterbalances the few points at which the horror becomes too real. The rest is just mayhem. It averages out as a success.

To my knowledge, B-movie super-producer Roger Corman had no involvement in any aspect of Piranha 3D, even though it is clearly a follow-up to his 1978 film Piranha¹. I imagine he will love it, though. This is a highly polished B-movie, but it retains all the elements for which B-movies are loved -- gratuitous imagery, shameless humor, and a science fiction-based explanation that lacks logic. The fact that its 3D is so misused only enhances the effect.