Month: August 2018

Don’t you just love it when you stand on the beach of an ocean or large lake and listen to the waves crashing on the shore?  That sense of calm coupled with the beauty of the water and the waves puts you at ease with the world and makes you forget all your troubles.  The oceans are some of the last places on earth that have yet to be dominated by mankind.  Teeming with all forms of life near the surface and towards the unimaginable depths, the variety of species and plant life far exceeds our capacity to discover and count them.  However, if certain movies are to be believed, these dark depths are home to some of the most unimaginable terrors yet to be encountered.  The movies that I’m talking about today are some of my favorite monster movies that take place either in the oceans or in gigantic lakes.  So….hold on for dear life, because there’s no escaping the terrors of the deep.

Jaws

Yeah, I’m going to start off with the best of the bunch, because I want to get it out of the way.  Jaws is easily the greatest shark movie in cinematic history.  This was the film that not only put Steven Spielberg on the map as a director, but it became the world’s first summer blockbuster film.  It was intended to be a bit of a b-movie, but it ended up being one of the greatest thrillers of all time.  Featuring a stellar cast including Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss, Jaws was not only a very strong horror movie, but it also featured some amazing characters and white-knuckle tension.  The greatest thing about the film?  You only see maybe 5 minutes worth of shark.  Due to technical difficulties with the prop, Spielberg was forced to use other methods to “show” the shark, by not showing it.  Instead, he opted to use John Williams’s iconic music to tell the audience when the shark is coming.  This is an absolute brilliant piece of film-making.  No other movie before or since can come close to the masterpiece that is Jaws.

Piranha(1978)

Whenever a big movie becomes successful, it doesn’t take very long for people to start trying to copy the success of the film.  Jaws was no different.  After the film became a major hit, Jaws was inundated with a huge amount of knock-offs and spoofs.  One of the more successful ones was 1978’s Piranha.  Directed by notable horror film director Joe Dante and produced by legendary b-movie schlock jock, Roger Corman, Piranha takes the threat of underwater predators and throws them into a river during a wild celebration.  Instead of a Great White Shark, you have hundreds of flesh-eating piranha tearing people to shreds.  What makes this movie so fun, is the fact that it knows that it’s a rip-off and just goes with it.  It plays out very much the same way that Jaws did and even features some of the same kinds of characters.  It’s just a lot of fun from beginning to end.

Deep Star Six

While Jaws scared most people, including my mom, out of the ocean, it didn’t really scare me that much.  The one movie that scared the hell out of  me when I was a kid though, was Deep Star Six.  This was a very claustrophobic film that takes place on the bottom of the ocean where a group of scientists mistakenly unleash a cave-dwelling monster that terrorizes the group.  While this fucker gave me nightmares as a kid, I still come back to it, because I enjoy the hell out of it.  There is a real sense of isolation and claustrophobia that permeates the entire film.  While Deep Star Six is more of an Alien rip-off, it still manages to entertain with some really strong performances from Greg Evigan, Miguel Ferrer, and Matt McCoy.  This is one of those films that I wish Shout! Factory or Lionsgate Studios would get a hold of it and give it a high-definition Blu-Ray release.

Leviathan

1989 featured three movies that were set underwater.  One of them was James Cameron’s The Abyss, which was a PG-13 adventure film, and was a pretty solid movie.  At the same time, Sean S. Cunningham(director of Friday The 13th) released his own underwater feature, Deep Star Six that I mentioned above.  The film that actually did the worst at the box-office and yet is probably regarded as the best of the three is Leviathan.  Like Deep Star Six, Leviathan takes place at the bottom of the ocean.  Instead of scientists, we’ve got miners lead by Peter Weller’s Beck.  Honestly, this one feels more like an Alien film than Deep Star.  The creature effects by Stan Winston are gruesome and fantastic.  You have strong performances by Peter Weller, Amanda Pays, Richard Crenna as well as a surprisingly serious turn from Daniel Stern.  The musical score by Jerry Goldsmith is absolutely wonderful and gives this film a serious b-movie vibe that makes it work.

Deep Rising

Deep Rising is so much fun, I can’t believe why it didn’t do well at the box-office.  It was one of the few R-rated monster movies to be released during the late 90s.  It definitely earned its R-rating.  It was gory, it was intense, and it was surprisingly funny at times.  This was a film that really knew what it was and what it wanted to be, and it fired on all cylinders.  It was basically Jaws meets Tremors with a fairly unique and interesting monster.  While the final reveal of the beast was not very impressive, the visual and practical effects were.  This was 1998, so the CGI was very impressive, and Stephen Sommers(who would direct The Mummy with Brendan Fraser)proved that he could deliver a solid b-movie thrill-ride.  Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Wes Studi, Kevin J. O’Connor, Anthony Heald and others helped elevate would could’ve been a run-of-the-mill monster movie.  It’s action-packed, gruesome and an absolute blast from beginning to end.

Piranha(2010)

Wait a second here.  Didn’t I already mention Piranha?  Oh, yeah, that was the 1978 film.  This it the 2010 re-make from horror director Alexandre Aja.  Instead of dealing with genetically altered piranha like in the original film, the ones we deal with here are over 2 million years old.  While I definitely credit the original Piranha for being a really fun knock-off of Jaws, the re-make is the superior film in many ways.  For the one, the effects were done by the KNB Effects Group which really specializes in realistic gore effects for horror movies.  Boy, this film is gory.  While some of the CGI and 3d effects are not overly impressive, the film still succeeds by delivering one of the bloodiest beach scenes I’ve ever seen.  That’s an accomplishment for what is a mainstream horror film.  Instead of going the super serious route of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw, Piranha opts for a more hilarious approach, as evidenced by the inclusion of such charactor actors like Jerry O’Connell and Christopher Lloyd.  This movie is absolutely bonkers and it’s all the better for it.  This is one of the rare occasions where the re-make is better than the original film.

Deep Blue Sea

Never genetically modify sharks.  Ever.  That’s a lesson that the scientist characters from Deep Blue Sea never learned and the whole thing gets turned upside down.  I like it.  Instead of a Great White Shark terrorizing people, you’ve got a group of folks stuck in an underwater structure being hunted by a group of genetically modified sharks.  How many movies have seen where one of the main characters delivers an inspirational speech and suddenly gets eaten by a shark?  Not many, I gather, and certainly not ones that star Samuel L. Jackson.  Deep Blue Sea isn’t a great movie and feels very cliche at times, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fun.  It takes itself seriously enough to be intense, but it loosens up enough to let the audience’s guard down.  It’s a goofy b-level shark movie.  It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than that.

While there are other movies out there like these, these are the ones that I remember loving the most.  They’re a lot of fun, don’t take themselves too seriously and are just worth the price of admission.  So, yeah.  That’s my list for the Best Underwater Creature Features.  Always remember:  Whenever you swim in the ocean, you are no longer the top of the food chain.  There may be something lurking in the depths below that may think you are a tasty treat.  Have fun!

Ever since the early 20th century, there have been movies that have changed the world and redefined how we see movies.  A lot of these movies can be considered timeless.  Films like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Star Wars, Scarface, and others have influenced generations of film-makers over the decades.  These are movies that many audiences will never forget and will continue to influence up-and-coming film-makers for decades.  There have also been films since the dawn of the 21st century that will also have the honor of being remembered.  But there are also quite a few that will end up being forgotten, regardless of their quality.  These are some of the films that I really enjoyed, but feel will end up being left by the wayside as time goes on.  The films that I’m going to discuss are from the year 2000 up to now, so anything from 1999 or before will be saved for another time.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

As someone who grew up with Star Wars, along with many people, my anticipation for Episode VII was sky-high ever since Disney bought Lucasfilm.  Personally, I was not disappointed with how the film turned out.  I enjoyed the hell out of and thought it was a good Star Wars movie.  The overall reaction to the film was mostly positive as well.  There’s a bit of a problem, and a lot of people noticed it:  The film felt far too similar to the original film in how it plays out, with certain super-weapons, and overall themes.  Say what you will about The Last Jedi, at least that movie took major risks and was very, very different from what most people were expecting.  That film is going to continue to be a source of major discussion for years to come, regardless of how people felt about it.  The Force Awakens, though, doesn’t do enough to stand out from the other movies that came before.  There’s nothing here that could be considered to be iconic or even memorable.  How many people 20 or 30 years from now will remember this film?  Not many, I would imagine.  I personally loved the movie, but even I admit that it’s far too derivative of older films in the series.

The Hobbit Trilogy

Director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema took a huge risk when started production on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  They weren’t even sure that the first movie was going to be successful, considering how the production was planned.  Yet, the risk paid off in many, many ways.  The Lord of the Rings became one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time, featuring some of the greatest visual effects, music and acting ever.  It truly was epic in every sense of the word.  20 years later, the trilogy still stands as perhaps the greatest fantasy film series since Star Wars.  That is not an easy feat to accomplish.  When it was announced that The Hobbit was going to be adapted into a movie series, there were questions on how that was going to happen.  For one, The Lord of the Rings started out as a trilogy of books, whereas The Hobbit is just one book.  The initial plan was for two movies and that would have worked, but somebody decided to make it a trilogy.  Stretching a 400 page book into a massive epic trilogy was one of the dumbest ideas ever.  They tried.  Oh, they tried.  I enjoyed the movies, I enjoyed the story, but you could tell that they were stretching it beyond what it needed to be.  That’s not even mentioning the fact that most of the film was done on a sound-stage with green screens.  It looked like a video game.  Again, I enjoyed the movies, but quite frankly, it was rushed and the higher-ups didn’t give Peter Jackson enough time to really get it right.  I can almost guarantee you that most people 5 years from now won’t even remember that these three movies exist.

Braven

Jason Momoa has been quite the revelation over the past decade.  The role that put him in the spotlight was as Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones.  Despite his size and build, Jason is a fantastic actor and will make an amazing Arthur Curry in Aquaman.  Braven is a movie where Jason Momoa plays a blue-collar worker who has to defend his family against a gang of drug-runners.  In spite of a strong cast and really good acting, the film isn’t really able to justify its existence among other thrillers that have done the same thing and have done it better.  I enjoyed it, but it feels very generic and plays out exactly as you would expect.  It’s very predictable, which is a shame considering the film’s location in Newfoundland.  It didn’t get a huge release in theaters and was unceremoniously dumped onto DVD/Blu-Ray and Video-On-Demand.  Most people won’t remember this one, because they have no idea that it even exists.

The Meg

It’s Jason Statham against a giant shark.  What more do you want?  Truth be told, I wanted a lot more carnage than I got from a film featuring a 100-foot shark.  That is, perhaps, the film’s greatest failing:  Not going far enough.  I understand the business decision of making the film PG-13, and considering that the film doesn’t take itself seriously, it was good for what it was.  However, I feel that The Meg needed a hell of a lot more bite(pun definitely intended).  The original intention of the film-makers was to make an R-rated movie, but the studios said no, they wanted to get as many people into theaters as possible.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many movies have suffered because of that dumb-ass decision.  While the film did pretty well at the box-office, I don’t think people are going to remember this one in a year or two.  It doesn’t have the same kind of draw that Jaws did back in 1975.  I enjoyed it for what it was, but it needed to be a lot more violent than it was.

Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 is an absolutely amazing film and it deserves its time in the sun.  The reason I think people will forget about this film is because like the original film from 1981, Blade Runner 2049 is a film that is well ahead of its time.  That is both the film’s strength and one of its biggest detriments.  Some people were still expecting an action film, because it had Harrison Ford.  Here’s the thing:  The original film was not an action movie, it was a neo-noir detective story, and 2049 is in the same field.  After the original film was released, it was quickly forgotten and it didn’t start gaining a real cult status until it hit home video.  Even then, it took years for people to re-discover the film, and now the original Blade Runner is regarded as one of the best science fiction movies of its kind.  I believe that 2049 will get the same treatment.  I really do.  It’s a film that’s worth seeing again and again.  But for the time being, it’s a film that’s probably going to be forgotten for a while.  Maybe that could be a good thing.  Maybe 20-30 years down the road, the film will get the respect that it truly deserves.

Those are some of the films that I enjoyed that I feel that are going to be forgotten in the near future.  For some, it’s a damn shame, for others, it’s expected.  I personally won’t forget them, but most people are going to move on and that’s okay.

Seasons: 3

Number of Episodes: 30

Years On Air: 2015-2018

Status: Cancelled

Distributor: Anchor Bay/Lionsgate Films

Genre: Horror/Comedy

Cast:
Bruce Campbell: Ash Williams
Ray Santiago: Pablo Simon Bolivar
Dana DeLorenzo: Kelly Maxwell
Lucy Lawless: Ruby Knowby

The legacy of The Evil Dead franchise goes back well over 35 years, when college friends Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell set out to make a small horror flick set in the woods.  In spite of the costs and being relatively new to making feature-length films, Sam Raimi crafted what has since become a major cult classic in every sense of the word.  From it’s really creepy atmosphere, gruesome visual effects, and guerilla-style film-making to then-up-and-coming star Bruce Campbell’s performance, The Evil Dead was a surprise hit in 1981.  This was the film that would put future Spider-Man director Sam Raimi on the map and making Bruce Campbell a bonafide star in the process.  Because of the film’s success, Raimi and company went on to craft a direct sequel, Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn in 1987.  Featuring more gore and gruesome visual effects, the sequel opted to take a more light-hearted and comedic approach to the goings-on.  While it was still dark in tone, it still garnered a lot of laughs from the audience because of it’s sheer insanity.  Like the original film, Dead By Dawn would become very successful in its own right, with many people declaring it to be one of the best sequels ever made.  A lot of people even consider Evil Dead II to be the best film in the franchise.  There were plans for another sequel that was going to be called The Medieval Dead, but distribution and name rights to the first two films were yanked from Sam Raimi, so he had to approach another studio to get the film made.  A third film was made called Army of Darkness and a lot of folks consider it to be the weakest entry in the series, and….they’re not wrong.  Army of Darkness pretty much eschewed the horror aspect for a more action/comedy approach set in the Dark Ages.  Surprisingly enough, it actually worked and still ended up being a really fun time.  Over the following 20 years or so, rumors persisted of a fourth film, and even the film-makers and Bruce Campbell were taking a look at the idea, even though nothing came of it at the time.  In 2011-2012, Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi had announced a re-make of the original film that was going to be directed by newcomer Fede Alvarez and starring Jane Levy as Mia.  The re-make was released in 2013 to mostly positive reviews for taking the franchise back to its roots in horror.  A couple of years later, Bruce Campbell announced that he would be returning to the role of Ash Williams for a newly-conceived Starz television series called Ash Vs. Evil Dead.

One of the mistakes I feel I made when I reviewed the first 5 seasons of Game of Thrones was to tackle one season at a time.  While I don’t regret doing those, my approach to reviewing a TV series needed to be refined quite a bit.  For Ash Vs. Evil Dead, I’m going to be covering the entire show, because it’s only 3 seasons long.  However, instead of doing a thorough season-by-season review, I’m going to an overview of a series as it stands while highlighting key moments and episodes that represent the entire show as best as possible.  So, with that said, let’s get into it.  Ash Vs. Evil Dead picks up 35 years after the events of the original movie, and sees aging Ash Williams as an employee of a local hardware store.  While out on the town after work, he picks up a local girl for a one-night stand along with some alcohol and proceeds to have a good time.  Forgetting that he has the Necronomicon Ex Mortis in his possession, he inadvertently reads passages from the book and re-releases evil on the world.  That’s pretty much the gist of it, and the rest of the series is basically him and a couple of sidekicks trying to reverse what he did.  What follows is surprisingly gory, yet hilarious focusing on Ash being both a complete doofus and bad-ass at the same time.  We’re also introduced to new characters Pablo and Kelly as they are accidentally drawn into this horrifying situation.  What happens during the show is kind of what you would expect from a show with Evil Dead in the title.  People get possessed and die in unbelievably horrific and over-the-top ways, and you’ve got Pablo and Kelly wanting to actually fight the Evil with Ash just wanting to run and hide.  That’s an over-simplification of course, but that is the gist of what goes on, and more often than not, it’s really quite hilarious.

What I really love about this show, aside from Bruce Campbell coming back as Ash, is how the series expands on the lore of the Evil Dead universe.  We’re given more information about the evil force that’s been haunting Ash for decades as well as who was responsible for writing the Necronomicon in the first place.  Over the course of the show, we’re also shown what happens to people’s souls after they’ve been killed or possessed by the Evil.  It literally adds a whole new dimension to the Evil Dead universe.  The show also introduces us to a new group of characters who call themselves the Knights of Sumeria, who apparently have been battling this evil for centuries.  One of my favorite episodes is “Books From Beyond” in which Ash and his friends go to a bookstore that specializes in the occult and the strange and they try to summon an actual demon from Hell so they can get some answers on how to destroy evil.  The episode alludes to these ancient demonic beings known as The Dark Ones, which adds a layer of mystery as to why they exists and what they want.

Season two changes things up a little bit by forcing Ruby, a new character that was revealed to be a Dark One, to team up with Ash against a new demon called Baal.  Like the first season, season 2 has a lot of fantastic blood and gore and throws in a few interesting twists here and there.  Some of my favorite episodes take place in an asylum where Ash is trapped by the demon Baal who takes the form of a doctor.  These are interesting episodes you have no idea if whether or not Ash has been hallucinating or if everything was real.  It was a very cleverly written plot device that kept me guessing.  Season 2 had some really spectacular moments peppered throughout.

Season 3 is where my problems with the show start happening.  The season starts off pretty strong, but it kind of sags in the middle with a lot of things just repeating themselves.  Ash himself was starting to get on my nerves a bit.  I understand the character was a bit of a bonehead and most of the time pretty likable, but there were moments throughout season 3 where I’m left scratching my head a little bit.  The humor also ended up being pretty juvenile in some ways.  We learn in this season that Ash has a daughter, Brandy and she’s become a target for Ruby and the Evil.  Story-wise, season 3 is actually pretty strong.  Yeah, Ash is a goofball, but we find out that he’s a father and he actually tries to be the best father he can be in the short time that he’s known his daughter, and that aspect of the season is really good.  We finally get to see Ash evolve somewhat as a character and that makes for a more compelling experience.  Overall, the third and final season is filled with both very strong and very weak elements, making it more of a mixed bag.  I understand that the producers weren’t sure whether or not the series was going to get cancelled, so they tried to kind of cap off Ash’s story and to a certain extent, it’s successful, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  Sadly, the numbers that Starz wanted to see didn’t happen and ended up going down, so they decided to cancel the show.  I’m ultimately not surprised, given how the season ended and how some elements just didn’t quite work.  Ruby, as a character, outstayed her welcome by at least a good season and a half.  That’s no fault of the actress, though, it’s just the way the character was written, and I think that’s part of why season 3 had issues.  The writers, I feel, wrote themselves into a wall with season 2, so there was no real good way to bounce back from that.

The acting is pretty good overall, with Bruce Campbell knocking it out of the park as he always does with Ash.  If you haven’t seen the first three Evil Dead films, go watch them.  They are fantastic.  I actually like how some of the actors and characters evolved over the course of the show.  Ray Santiago as Pablo is particularly interesting as this character who has a gift that he’s kind of suppressed until the demons start showing up.  He begins to embrace who he is and he becomes a bit of a bad-ass in his own right by the end of the show.  Same thing for Dana DeLorenzo, who plays Kelly.  Lucy Lawless is the other one that also steals the show at certain points.  She plays Ruby, who is revealed to be immortal.  I’ve always like Lucy as an actress, even when she was playing Xena back in the 90s.  She puts everything into whatever she’s doing and she’s an absolute blast to watch as a villain.  Over the course of the show, we have various actors show up in some surprising roles, like Lee Majors as Ash’s father and Ted Raimi as a hard-partying old friend of Ash’s.  Hell, even Ellen Sandweiss, who starred in the original movie, shows up in a cameo appearance.  There’s also a lot of throwbacks to the older films that are awesome and pretty much expected in a show like this.

So…what are my overall impressions of Ash Vs. Evil Dead?  I think if you are a huge fan of the original Evil Dead films, you’re going to find a lot to love about this show.  Maybe not in how it ends, but basically almost everything else up until that point.  Bruce Campbell is still hilarious as Ash and all the actors throughout the show are fantastic.  The visual effects and the gore are absolutely awesome.  It never gets old seeing Ash get hosed with blood.  It’s absurd to the point of hilarity, and that’s the point.  This show is freakin’ bonkers and it runs with it.  Yeah, the show stumbles here and there, but what show doesn’t?  I think the positives outweigh the bad and it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.  It’s just too bad that we’re not going to see any more of these characters, at least not in a TV show.  Bruce Campbell said at one point, that if the show was cancelled, he would retire from playing the character.  Apparently, though, he’s going to be voicing the character in an upcoming video game of sorts, but I don’t know too much about that right now.

So where does Evil Dead go from here?  It’s hard to say.  With the exception of the re-make film, Ash has been very central to the franchise for over three decades.  Replacing the character would take some serious thinking and some serious writing get it to work right.  It’s entirely possible that the character’s daughter could take up his mantle and that’s a pretty promising idea, I think.  I know that there’s been talk about doing a sequel to the re-make for years, but nothing’s materialized as of yet.  Ultimately, there’s a lot more to the Evil Dead universe than what the movies have shown us.  The show expanded on the universe in its own way, but we’ve also had video games and comic books that have told their own stories with Ash and his friends.  I think there’s a lot of potential in where the franchise could go.  Will we see another TV show?  I doubt it.  There were plans for a fourth season of Ash Vs. Evil Dead, but since the show was cancelled, those plans no longer matter.  Ultimately, though, I’m just glad we got to see Bruce Campbell play Ash Williams for one last ride and what a ride it’s been.  Hail to the king, baby!

My Final Recommendation:

Season 1: 9/10
Season 2: 8.5/10
Season 3: 8/10

Released: August 2010

Director: Alexandre Aja

Rated R

Run Time: 88 Minutes

Distributor: Sony Pictures/Dimension Films

Genre: Horror

Cast:
Elisabeth Shue: Julie Forester
Ving Rhames: Deputy Fallon
Steven R. McQueen: Jake Forester
Jerry O’Connell: Derrick Jones
Adam Scott: Novak
Christopher Lloyd: Mr. Carl Goodman
Richard Dreyfuss: Matt Boyd

Earlier this week, I had reviewed a new shark movie starring Jason Statham called The Meg, which was about a 100-foot megalodon that was terrorizing the ocean.  I gave the film a pretty favorable score, saying that it knew what kind of movie it was and it rolled with it.  But there were some missed opportunities in the film that really shouldn’t have been missed in a movie like that.  That was most likely to do with the PG-13 rating.  I understand why the studio did it, to get more people and families into theaters.  Great.  But there were moments in the film especially towards the end of the film where an R-rating really needed to be appropriate.  You have a 100-foot giant shark.  With that, you have opportunities for some serious bone-crunching, flesh-ripping carnage.  Alas, it was not meant to be, because the movie studio lacked a spine, so to speak.  The beach sequence at the end of the film should have been a gloriously gory and visceral experience that would have been crowd-pleasing.  It really would have.  Honestly, had Warner Bros taken a page from Alexandre Aja’s Piranha re-make from 2010, The Meg could have been so much more.  Speaking of which, I am reviewing the 2010 version of Piranha for you today.

It is Spring Break in the fictional town of Lake Victoria, Arizona.  The town’s population of 5,000 people has surged to 20,000 as college students from out-of-town show up to do what they do best in a party situation: Drink beer and get nekkid while listening to awful music.  Trying to contain the chaos is Sheriff Julie Forester and her team of deputies to try and keep the damage to a minimum.  Little do they know is that an earthquake had cracked open a previously unknown ancient underwater lake releasing thousands of ravenous piranhas.  The story is simple, straight-forward and keeps things moving at a rapid-fire pace.  Piranha is a loose re-make of the 1978 film which was already a Jaws knock-off, but still ended up being a pretty decent film in its own right.  This film by French film-maker Alexandre Aja is a different beast altogether.  It is a wonderful throwback to the horror movies of the 80s where they used to be really fun and gory.  Horror movies these days tend to be far too serious for their own good, so watching Piranha again is an absolute blast.

You can tell right when the movie starts that the movie is going to be all sorts of fun.  The acting in the film is pretty good and I’ll get to the main players in a bit, but I want to mention some of the cameos first.  The first one is Richard Dreyfuss.  If you recall, Mr. Dreyfuss played Matt Hooper from Jaws, so seeing him here playing another Matt is pretty awesome.  You’ve also got some pretty nifty cameos from folks like famed horror director Eli Roth as well as make-up effects master Greg Nicotero.  The one extended cameo that was pretty cool was Christopher Lloyd as an eccentric shop-owner that has some serious knowledge of prehistoric piranha.  Elisabeth Shue plays the town’s sheriff and she’s a bit of a bad-ass.  Ving Rhames is her second-in-command and Ving’s always fun to watch whenever he’s on screen.  Steven R. McQueen, who also happens to be the grandson of the legendary Steve McQueen, plays Jake Forester, the oldest son of the sheriff.  Adam Scott is fantastic as a scientist that showed up to investigate the earthquake and has some of the best line delivery in the film.  Jerry O’Connell plays the sleazy “Girls Gone Wild”-type film-maker to perfection.  He’s clearly having a ball playing a character that you hope dies in a horrible fashion.  Aside from a bunch of extras, you’ve also got a few porn stars that show up for some….reason or another.  There’s nothing Oscar-worthy here, but some of these characters are surprisingly likable.

If you’ve come for the carnage, you’ve come to the right place.  If you have a weak stomach, it’s probably best to stay away.  This is one of the goriest main-stream movies that I’ve seen in years.  This a film that really goes for the jugular.  Literally.  You have small encounters throughout the film with the fish that are pretty graphic, but the real centerpiece of the film is the beach massacre.  Holy.  Shit.  They really went all out for the visual effects in this film.  There’s definitely some CGI and obvious effects that were designed for a 3-D experience, but they actually provide a darkly humorous flair to the whole thing.  The gore is second to none and we have visual effects maestros Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero to thank for that.  The level of detail on the bodies and the gore is among some of the best I’ve seen from these guys.  If you’re a gorehound like me, then Piranha is going to be right up your alley.

When it comes to underwater creature-features, the Piranha re-make is one of my favorites alongside films like Jaws, Leviathan, and DeepStar Six.  It is a gore-filled adrenaline rush with a wicked sense of humor.  I consider this film to be one of the funnest horror movies of the decade.  It’s definitely a throwback, but in the best way possible.  I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be a classic or anything and some of the CGI hasn’t aged well at all, but the overall tone of the film and the fact that it runs at a breakneck pace makes it an absolute winner in my book.  It’s definitely a wild ride.

My Final Recommendation: Sleazy porn directors make for the best piranha bait.  9/10