Today’s movie simply shouldn’t exist. Well, to be fair, a lot of movies shouldn’t exist. But that’s not what I mean. Not because it’s bad. Because it is unlikely in every sense of the word. It’s a film that features an acclaimed director at the height of his popularity taking on a 3D piranha spring break film featuring copious amounts of nudity and Jerry O’Connell’s penis. There’s an Oscar winning actor and Oscar nominated actress fighting against angry fish whose special effects would have looked bad in a late 90s McDonald’s Filet O Fish advertisement…much less on the big screen in 2015. All to the tremendous delight of professional movie critics world-wide as well as the MPAA. What I mean is that Piranha 3D simply should not be. And yet here we are. It’s a story that involves a failed Halloween movie pitch, a lawsuit from the “Girls Gone Wild” guy, two women learning to breathe underwater so they could make out longer…and again… Jerry O’Connell’s severed penis. This is what happened to Piranha 3D.
Today, you could consider buddy writers Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger as “horror writers”. Throughout the years they’ve worked on the underrated and fun Sorority Row remake and multiple entries into the Saw franchise, including the widely beloved Saw X. Back in 1997, however, Stolberg’s big break in the industry had been several episodes of the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids TV show, followed by a stint writing on Sabrina: The Animated Series. Stolberg was desperate to align with his fate and get himself and his writing partner into the horror genre where they belonged. He had even secured himself a meeting with the great Moustapha Akkad of the Halloween franchise to pitch a couple of ideas for the next installment. One even included a campy Pinhead Versus Michael Myers face-off. Akkad passed, as he had on many a writers’ pitch over the years, citing the need to stick to the franchise rules of Michael Myers.
Stolberg kept trying but was having trouble breaking into the horror genre with only kids TV experience on his resume. Finally, he saw his opportunity in his friend and producer J. Todd Harris, who happened to own the rights to the Piranha franchise. Stolberg convinced Todd Harris to wait two months for him and his writing partner Pete Goldfinger to write a spec script before he gave the project to someone else. If he liked it, he could have it. If not, no problem. He agreed. The two banged the script out and even gave themselves a back door in the very likely scenario that their script was rejected: they named it “Killer Fish.” This way, they could always keep it for themselves. This turned out to be unnecessary as the script was accepted. As Matthew McConaughey would say in this situation….Greenlight.
But who would direct? Say what you want about the Piranha franchise, but the list of previous directors was daunting. 1978’s Piranha was helmed by the legendary Joe Dante; Its sequel directed some guy named James Cameron. The man who ended up with the job, Alexandre Aja, wanted to bring both back for a cameo as boat captains, but unfortunately Cameron was too busy. Regardless, Aja couldn’t have been a more perfect choice than if they’d gotten Steven Spielberg himself hammered drunk on a boat and handed him a camera. Aja was coming off the heels of two genre pushing films that helped cornerstone the mean mid-2000s of horror in High Tension and his The Hills Have Eyes remake. Aja was ready to take on anything, and his previous filmography was proof of it.
Alexandre Aja was originally teased on the project in 2004, then titled Piranha: Lake Havasu, but nothing official came to fruition. In the meantime, Dimension attached Witchboard director Chuck Russell to the project. Russell rewrote the script by Stolberg and Goldfinger into an underwater thriller that had moments directly taken from the original film. As things so often did when it came to the Weinsteins, friction about the budget, along with God knows what else, led to them bringing the project back to Aja six years later. He was ready to take on a new challenge and try to bring fun films like Evil Dead and Dead Alive back to the forefront. He happily accepted the job on the condition they could go back to the fun of the Spring Break script, along with a rewrite from him and his writing partner Gregory Levasseur. He also signed on as Producer.
A big thing the press had glommed onto in the marketing of Piranha 3D was that Aja and crew used a supposed whopping 80,000 gallons of blood while making it. If true, that makes this a still held world record for a movie, which is pretty freaking rad. But Aja wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t like the violence of his other movies. This was 80,000 gallons of “fun blood” meant to give the audience a good time. And he was going to do so with a shockingly talented cast.
We aren’t making The Pianist here but the difference between a Piranha 3D and something like a Sharknado is that the film never truly jumps the proverbial shark. It’s silly…. there are boobs everywhere…and sometimes the special effects make you wonder whether you’ve been drugged by a psychotropic hallucinogen. But due to its talented and aware cast, it never goes full Simple Jack. Even the opening scene features Oscar winning actor Richard Dreyfuss directly referencing his character from Jaws. Though he later admitted to only doing so for the large paycheck he received from Bob Weinstein. Who cares? It’s also a welcome shock to follow that up with seeing Oscar nominated actress Elisabeth Shue’s name in the opening credits. Alexandre Aja reached out to Shue personally, insisting it was time for her to “go on an adventure”. This, alongside the insanity of the script, left her intrigued and unable to say no. She was the perfect anchor for the batshit project.
The fun doesn’t end there. Ving Rhames is cast as the guy sent to essentially tell everyone to “get the fuck out of the water” in a way only Ving Rhames can. Before, of course, sacrificing his life to kill thousands of fish with a boat propellor rather than just stepping out of the waist deep water. Don’t forget the legend Christopher Lloyd, who is perfectly typecast as the nutty Science dude back in the lab. Just a welcome face to see at any time.
Adam Scott plays it relatively straight as a helpful dude with awesome hair, and Eli Roth makes a cameo as a boob obsessed Wet T-shirt contest host. The gold performance of the film belongs to Jerry O’Connell as Derrick Jones. Something about his performance as an all-time doucher leading a Spring Break sex-shoot cruise meant to parody “Girls Gone Wild” felt a little too well done. Why is this so intense and on the cocaine dusted nose? Does O’Connell have some explaining to do about his life when he’s not cohosting The Talk or hanging out with the best Mystique in the X-Men franchise, Rebecca Romijn? Turns out yes and no.
O’Connell hilariously took the role as though he was literally playing Girls Gone Wild mogul Joe Francis. He admitted to being at some of Francis’ parties in his younger days and said he wanted to make his portrayal of the character as hateful as possible. Joe Francis was not happy. Some could say he went wild. Francis had his lawyers send a nasty letter threatening swift litigation. Francis went on to say that “Mr. O’Connell may lose more than his penis (i.e., lots of money) if he and the Weinstein Co. chose to release the film and continue to falsely associate him with its questionable content.” He also noted that despite his own lawyers telling him not to, O’Connell kept telling the press he was portraying Francis in the film. The passion comes across in the performance.
Filmed in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Piranha 3D wasn’t all fun and boobs. Any filmmaker will tell you that filming on the water is a nightmare. Aja was no different, calling it the hardest film he’d ever worked on. Between the heat, kids, CG piranha, and 3D? Things quickly became challenging. Ultimately, the film would be one of the first to successfully shoot in 2D and convert to 3D in post. That hadn’t been the initial plan but the water proved to be too much of a challenge to overcome in 3D. They were already spending hours of the day waiting around, communicating with the director through megaphones in the hot sun, while trying to get multiple boats and cameras into place.
The now famous Spring Break massacre scene featuring everything from Eli Roth’s head being squished to a woman’s face being ripped off by a boat propeller was taken strictly from the script. This was done to help keep them on task when there were so many bodies to mutilate at any given moment. Aja explained that they would look at the script to decide which deaths they had to take out due to budgetary reasons. There was originally a shot of Paul Scheer’s death in the film when a piranha jumps up and bites off his nose that had to be cut due to budgetary difficulties as well. The crew had only nine days to film the twenty minute ordeal of death, blood, boobs, and dismemberment.
Speaking of difficult shots, one particular moment in the film features an extended and elongated sequence of two naked models, Riley Steele and Kelly Brook, making out naked underwater while simultaneously swimming and fondling each other. The whole thing was strange. TERRIBLE. We all hated it. Even worse, those poor actresses said they had to quote unquote “have a lot of practice” making out underwater to make the scene work. See? It was terrible for everyone. We all hate it! Obviously, I’m joking. But Comic Con was dead serious when a planned panel at the event was cancelled due to them deciding the footage they would be promoting was “not appropriate.”
Amazing, considering that there’s no known qualm with the MPAA when it came to Piranha 3D. Which is Girls Gone Wild in itself for a movie with this much nudity, not to mention gore! For Christ’s sake, Jason couldn’t even stab someone too hard without saying “please” before the MPAA was up his ass. But somehow this film has everything from motor-boating to naked women parasailing with their bodies ripped in half from the exposed boobs down. It’s amazing.
The unicorn that is Piranha 3D opened up worldwide on August 20th, 2015, against Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston’s romcom The Switch and Nanny McPhee Returns (I like to think at least one group went to the wrong theater and ended up very confused). Opening a week after another horror comedy in Vampires Suck and a week before The Last Exorcism was a tough ask. Vampires Suck somehow took in more than both, if you can believe that.
However, Piranha edged out the return of Nanny McPhee and The Switch to the tune of over $10 million. The film would take in over $83 million worldwide by the time it was said and done. A good thing too, considering the films budget was shockingly high for a movie like this at $24 million. It would of course be enough for Dimension to spawn a sequel in Piranha 3DD, but that’s a story for another dark beach day.
The biggest surprise of all was the critics’ reaction. Everything about this movie, from the copious amount of T&A, to the 1997 video game levels of bad CGI, and metric fuck tons of gore is begging for critics to rip it apart. Ever the visionary, Alexandre Aja knew better.
The director later admitted that he’d had what he called a tough conversation with the Weinsteins when they refused to pre-screen the movie for any press, understandably fearing it would be ripped apart in the media. He had faith that the audience would understand what they were going for and be appreciative of how purposefully silly it all was. The studio at the time had been trying to play Piranha 3D off as a serious horror film in its marketing. Aja perfectly explained that this was a mistake, saying “We are not remaking Jaws. We are like today’s Jaws Gone Wild.” And he was right. The early media reactions were shockingly positive and so were the reviews when it was all said and done.
All in all, Piranha 3D could have been a forgettable, laughable skid mark on the underpants of horror like so many films before it. Instead, with the right director and a well communicated intent….it’s an immature shit show of a great time with jaw dropping special effects carnage. It’s Spring Break on horror steroids and that is what happened to Piranha 3D.
A couple of the previous episodes of this show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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