Trash Palace Dumpster-- Bobbie's Best of the Bad: Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)

As fans of the made-for-TV 2013 surprise hit Sharknado know, this aquatic disaster franchise is meant to be mocked and ridiculed. That's why it came as no surprise that last night's airing of Sharknado 2: The Second One garnered 5.3 million viewers who tweeted 215,000 tweets during it's two-hour running time. Snarks flew like the sharks in the movie with such notables as director Roger Corman tweeting "Do I sate myself? Do I soar? These are the existential questions that a shark in a #Sharknado2TheSecondOne must ask himself. So must we all" and Sharknado star Tara Reid twittering "when something bites us we bite back." So, without further ado, I give you my 6 reasons to love Sharknado 2: The Second One.

1. Cameos! By the dozens! Seems like everyone wanted to be in this movie! From NBC-TV anchormen Al Roker to Matt Lauer arguing about whether to call it a shark storm or a sharknado before stabbing to death a shark that lands on their desk to Jared Fogel, the Subway Sandwich Shop shill, eating a subway sandwich while waiting for a subway train. In one scene that made me want to sing "Don't Break My Achy-Breaky Shark", songster Billy Ray Cyrus appears as Tara Reid's surgeon. If you've ever yearned to see rapper Sandra "Pepa" Denton gets squashed by a shark while riding a Citibike, this is the movie for you! Or if you've ever wanted to watch Robert Klein chatter with WWE Superstar Kurt Angle while they play the Mayor of New York and the Chief of the FDNY respectively, well, here ya go! Or the guy from Shark Tank get killed by the detached rolling head of The Statue Of Liberty, this one's for you, sicko! Two of the best might be Robert Hays, star of the 1980 film Airplane!, as the pilot of the airliner attacked by flying sharks, and Judd Hirsch, who starred as Alex Reiger on the 1970s series Taxi as, what else, Ben the taxi driver!

2. It's terrifyingly easy to get access to weapons on The Big Apple. From napalm selling pizzeria owner Biz Markie to random citizens storing pick-axes, saws, machetes and machine guns in their car trunks, it's no wonder that this major metropolis area has such a high crime rate!
3. Knowing that "during an EF5 sharknado," sharks can come down at a rate of up to "two inches an hour." And that they can do this even while being on fire! On fire while climbing stairs!
4. In what can only be an homage to Bruce Campbell, Tara Reid's missing lower left arm is replaced with a circular saw she uses to kill the same flying shark that took her arm in the first place! After which, ex-husband Ian
   Ziering retrieves her chewed off arm from the sharks mouth, removes her wedding ring from the dead finger and, with sharks raining down all around him, drops to one knee and proposes to Tara! She says "Yes!", BTW. So, we can have romance in a disaster movie, right!?!
5. Climate change is real. As blizzard-like conditions move in from the East and meet with tropical storms coming in from the West, it snows in New York City on a clear June day. Al Roker told us this so it must be true and not a flimsy excuse to cover up the fact that it's snowing and we can see the actor's breaths on what's supposed to be a typical Summer's day!
6. And finally reason #6 … Sharknado 2: The Second One set a network record on Wednesday night with 3.9 million viewers for its premiere telecast. That makes it the most-watched movie in network history. What's more: It nabbed 1 billion Twitter impressions, according to the cable network.  Less than 24 hours later the SyFy channel astounded and surprised no one by announcing the third installment Sharknado 3 has been green-lit for release next year! Keep checking with SyFy.com for further updates. Meanwhile, if you missed it's premier showing July 30, it's showing again Saturday, August 2 at 7 pm. and Sunday, August 3 at 9 pm. (ET/PT).

Unimonster's Drive-In Classics - Roger Corman’s Cult Classics—Nurses Collection Box Set: Candy Stripe Nurses; Night Call Nurses; Private Duty Nurses; The Young Nurses

Title:  Roger Corman’s Cult Classics—Nurses Collection Box Set: Candy Stripe Nurses; Night Call Nurses; Private Duty Nurses; The Young Nurses

Year of Release—Film:  1974; 1972; 1971; 1973

Year of Release—DVD:  2012

DVD Label:  Shout! Factory

Reviewer:  Unimonster

Anyone who is a fan of the CBS comedy series How I Met Your Mother is familiar with the theory expounded by Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris, that in every era there is a profession towards which hot young women naturally gravitate.  In the early 1970s, there were two such professions—stewardesses (not flight attendants, that would come later), and nurses.  And true to form, both professions were frequently the subject of Exploitation films.

Roger Corman, the master of the low-budget movie, was never one to miss a trend, and often initiated them.  Such was the case when his newly formed New World Pictures chose as its first release in 1970 The Student Nurses, directed by Stephanie Rothman.  The movie did well enough to lead Corman to produce at least four more such films, and in 2012 these four were released in another of Shout! Factory’s excellent series of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics DVD sets.

Corman’s formula for these films was a simple one—take three or four beautiful young nurses, give each a plotline to follow, which would typically be something trendy or politically topical.  One girl would be the sweetheart, either innocent or slutty, looking for Mr. Right, or just Mr. Right Now.  One would be highly intelligent, usually more so than the doctors, and anxious to prove it; and the third girl would be the radical, representing the liberal feminist and racial themes that were close to both Cormans’—Roger and his wife Julie, who was producer on these movies—hearts.  Stir in generous helpings of sex, nudity, and action, and these movies were guaranteed box-office gold.

Private Duty Nurses (1971)

The earliest film in the set (one wishes that The Student Nurses had been included); this was the weakest of the four films, in my opinion.  It lacks many of the elements that one would expect to find in this kind of movie, namely copious amounts of female nudity, some measure of humor, and any semblance of a coherent plot—much less three of them.

Written and directed by George Armitage, what story there is in the movie is focused on the male counterparts to our three leading ladies—Spring (Kathy Cannon), who gets involved with a Vietnam vet with a death wish; Lynn (Pegi Boucher), who falls for a married ambulance attendant whom she meets when she finds a dead body on the beach; and Lola (Joyce Williams), who is dating a black doctor who’s the victim of discriminatory practices at the hospital where the girls work.

In the hands of a more competent director, there’s enough meat on these bones to flesh out a decent movie.  However, the women in the cast are given little to do except stand in the background, look pretty, listen to the men speak their lines, and (not nearly enough to save this movie) take their clothes off.  Not only does the lack of focus on the titular leads hurt this movie, but it’s by far the most political of the films, with the viewer constantly pummeled by the big three of the early 1970s causes—Vietnam, Racial Unrest, and the Environment.  That couldn't have been very entertaining in 1971; it definitely isn't now.

Night Call Nurses (1972)

Following on the heels of Private Duty Nurses, Jonathan Kaplan’s Night Call Nurses corrected some of the flaws present in the earlier film.  Kaplan, who was recommended to the Cormans by Martin Scorsese, was given a great degree of freedom by Corman.  He was allowed to rewrite the script, cast the movie, and edit the finished product—a massive amount of responsibility for a 25-year-old making his directorial debut.  The only part that was cast when Kaplan came on board was that of Janis, to be played by Alana Collins, the future former Mrs. George Hamilton and Rod Stewart—not at the same time.

Barbara (Patti T. Byrne), Sandra (Mittie Lawrence), and Janis are nurses in a psychiatric ward at an inner-city hospital.  Innocent young Barbara, under pressure from her boyfriend to conquer her sexual hang-ups and consummate their relationship, is seeing a sex therapist (Clint Kimbrough, who a year later would direct The Young Nurses) who has an unprofessional interest in the girl.  She soon becomes aware that she is being stalked—by a mysterious figure in a nurse’s uniform.

Janis, meanwhile, has become infatuated with a truck driver who has been in the hospital treating his addiction to amphetamine.  He claims that he only takes it in order to do his job, and that without it he can’t meet his schedules.  She takes him under her care—in more ways than one.

While this has been taking place, Sandra has been approached by a black militant seeking to get a message through to the leader of his movement, currently in the hospital’s jail ward after an alleged suicide attempt in prison.  At first resistant, Sandra soon becomes embroiled in a plan to free the prisoner.

Narrowly losing out to Candy Stripe Nurses as the best of Corman’s ‘Nurse’ films, despite having a weaker cast and script, the movie’s quality, what there is of it, can be ascribed to Kaplan’s ability as director.  The only one of the four featured in this set to have success as a mainstream filmmaker, Kaplan directed Jodie Foster in her Best Actress Oscar-winning role as Sarah Tobias in 1988’s The Accused.

The Young Nurses (1973)

When the first camera shot post-opening credits is a lovely young blonde sunning herself topless on a sailboat, you know that whatever else The Young Nurses is going to be, a thought-provoking, sensitive, intellectual study of the day-to-day lives of medical professionals it isn’t.  Directed by Clint Kimbrough, a long-time member of Corman’s stock company, The Young Nurses is pure exploitation; what plot exists is there solely by chance, and is for the most part too convoluted to engender any interest on the part of the viewer.

Three young nurses (despite there being four women on the poster, there were only three female leads … Corman’s ‘Nurse’ posters always featured an extra nurse) work at the only hospital to seemingly have an attached marina.  Kitty (Jean Manson), the beautiful blonde mentioned above, rescues then falls in love with a young man who managed to fall overboard from his boat while ogling her sunbathing.  Joanne (Ashley Porter), a brilliant nurse, believes she knows more than half the doctors on staff—and doesn’t hesitate to act like it.  And Michelle (Angela Gibbs) is hot on the trail of pushers who are flooding the streets with a deadly new drug.  That’s it … that’s the script.  The rest is filler—nurses getting naked on cue, the obligatory bumbling doctors, actors who either overplay or underplay every scene, and just enough nudity, sex and action to make it all fun.

The only bright points in the film are the performance of Allan Arbus as Dr. Krebs, and the final on-screen appearance of Mantan Moreland (billed as Man Tan Moreland) in a cameo role.  Arbus, best remembered as Dr. Sidney Freedman, the wise-cracking psychiatrist from the TV series M*A*S*H, is clearly the only member of the cast present for his acting ability.  Moreland, whose career began in the era of segregated films in the 1930s, had his most memorable role as Birmingham Brown in the series of Charlie Chan movies produced by Monogram Pictures in the mid-1940s.

All that being said, The Young Nurses does what it’s supposed to do.  It just doesn’t go overboard doing it … I know, I apologize.

Candy Stripe Nurses (1974)

The end of Corman’s ‘Nurse’ cycle was also the best of the series, Alan Holleb’s Candy Stripe Nurses.  Providing just the right balance of sex, plot, action and humor, and starring the queen of sexploitation films in the early ‘70s, Candice Rialson, Candy Stripe Nurses manages to be entertaining on a number of levels.

The film follows the exploits of three ‘candy-stripers’, young women who volunteer as nurses at a big city hospital.  Each girl has her own motives for volunteering:  Sandy (Rialson) simply wants to be close to her doctor boyfriend (as well as several of her patients); Dianne (Robin Mattson) sees it as the first step on her way to becoming a doctor; and Marisa (Maria Rojo), was ordered to volunteer as a consequence of attacking a teacher at her school.  The trio each finds a challenge to their talents, medical and otherwise.  Sandy works her way into the hospital’s sex clinic as a receptionist, a position which she uses to meet up with a famous rock and roll star who’s suffering, in the pre-Viagra 1970s, from an embarrassing lack of, um … enthusiasm, for his groupies.

Dianne falls in love with a basketball player who was admitted with what she believes were the symptoms of a drug overdose, but no one believes her, especially when the blood test comes back negative.  And Marisa takes up the cause of a young man in the prison ward, charged with robbing a gas station.  Only he swears to her that he is innocent.

The three plots are well-managed, and Holleb keeps things from becoming too tangled and confusing.  It’s not high art, but then what Corman film is?  It does the job, providing an hour and twenty minutes of mindless entertainment while munching popcorn.  That’s what it was intended to do in 1974, and it still does it today.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, or how a Little Plant named Audrey II took over the World!

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) began when director Roger Corman was given temporary access to a set left standing from shooting A BUCKET OF BLOOD the year before.  Re-fitting the sets, Roger Corman shot the principle photography of LITTLE SHOP in two days and one night from a script penned by Charles B. Griffith who had also written A BUCKET OF BLOOD.  Originally planned as a spy thriller by Corman, Griffith wanted to do another horror comedy.  It was only after a night of heavy drinking that Griffith persuaded Corman to shoot Griffith’s screenplay about a man-eating plant titled The Passionate People Eater.  The film was cast primarily from Corman’s stable of stock players.  Dick Miller, who had played the protagonist in A BUCKET OF BLOOD was offered the lead role of Seymour Krelboyne but turned it down, opting for the smaller role of the flower-eating customer Burson Fouch, so Jonathan Haze was hired to play Seymour.  Charles B. Griffith played several smaller roles, with his father appearing as a dental patient and his grandmother as Seymour’s hypochondriac mother.

Seymour Krelboyne is a nebbish who works at a skid-row florist shop run by boss Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles).  Seymour has a crush on co-worker Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph), a sweet but naive girl with no idea of Seymour’s affections.  One day, after flubbing a flower order, Mushnick fires Seymour but Seymour persuades Mushnick to give him another chance by showing him a strange and unusual plant that Seymour has named the Audrey 2, much to the original Audrey’s delight.  Audrey explains to Mushnick that placing such an unusual plant in the run-down shop’s window might draw more ... or even some ... customers into the shop, Seymour is given the task of improving the drooping plant’s health.  Later that night, Seymour finds out the plant need human blood to sustain itself and, fearing the loss of his job and the added loss of Audrey, he feeds it drops of his own blood.  The plant thrives on this diet, which of course creates a difficult situation for Seymour.  Curious customers are lured to the shop to see this wondrous plant and for the first time, Mushnick’s making money!  The now-anemic Seymour learns from the plant (voiced by writer Charles B. Griffith) that it needs to be fed human flesh and, as a confused Seymour wanders beside some train tracks, in frustration he throws a rock which accidentally kills a man.  Guilt-ridden but resourceful, Seymour takes the body back to the shop and feeds the parts to Audrey 2.  This terrible act is seem by Mushnick who intends to turn Seymour over to the police but, in his greed, procrastinates.

Seymour develops a toothache and goes to sadistic dentist Dr. Farb (John Shaner), who forcefully tries to remove several of Seymour’s teeth.  Grabbing a sharp instrument, Seymour fights back and accidentally stabs to death the dentist then feeds the body parts to Audrey 2.  Enter two homicide detectives, Sgt. Joe Fink (Wally Campo) and his assistant Frank Stoolie (Jack Warford) who questions the visibly nervous Mushnick about the recent disappearances but they decide Mushnick knows nothing and depart.  By now, Audrey 2 has grown several feet taller and is beginning to bud as does Seymour and Audrey’s romance.  One night as Mushnick is staying with the plant while Seymour and Audrey go on a date, a robber (played by Charles B. Griffith) breaks into the shop and demands money.  Mushnick tells him the money is kept in the plant and, when the robber goes to look, he falls into the plant’s mouth and is eaten.  Seymour, depressed that his plant has been the cause of so many deaths, goes for a midnight stroll and is perused by a rather relentless streetwalker, whom he kills in desperation and feeds to Audrey 2.

Still lacking clues to the mysterious disappearances, Fink and Stoolie plan to attend a special sunset celebration at the shop during which Seymour will receive a trophy from a horticulturist society and Audrey 2’s buds are expected to open.  But when they do open, each has the face of one of the victims.  Terrified, Seymour runs from the shop with Fink and Stoolie in hot pursuit.  Seymour loses them in a junkyard and later returns to the shop where he grabs a knife and, leaping into the plant’s mouth, kills it.  When Audrey, Mushnick and the cops return to the shop, they see the plant begin to wither.  It’s one final bud opens and within is Seymour’s face which pitifully declares, “I didn’t mean it” before drooping over.  The End.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS 1960 trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amlXKaqk2jg

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS was released August 5, 1960 as the second half of a double-feature with Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY and re-released a year later in a double-feature with THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH.  The estimated budget listed in The Internet Data Base is $27,000 but Corman remembers it as $30,000 and other sources place it’s budget as low as $22,000 to a high of $100,000.  No box office records exist for LITTLE SHOP but in his book How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime, Roger Corman states ““It was a let-down to make back the $30,000 negative cost with just a modest profit” and he didn’t copyright the movie, which has now gone into public domain.

The film’s popularity grew during the 1960-70’s with local horror hosts featuring it on their television programs.  Interest in the movie rekindled and it 1982, it became a hit off-Broadway horror rock musical called Little Shop of Horrors.  That later became a hit movie of the same title in 1986, directed by Frank Oz and starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Steve Martin, Vincent Gardenia, James Belushi, John Candy, Bill Murray, Christopher Guest with Levi Stubbs, one of the original Four Tops singing group, voicing Audrey 2.  Packed with snappy musical numbers, written by Academy Award-winning song-smith Miles Goodman, and featuring energetic chorography by Jerry Zaks and Vince Pesce, the film became a moderate hit, garnering a box office of $38 million on a budget of $25 million but became a smash hit when released on home video.

LITTLE SHOP was nominated for two Academy Awards and one Golden Globe Award.  LITTLE SHOP also became the first DVD to be recalled due to content.  In 1998, Warner Brothers released a DVD that contained the approximately 23-minute original ending but it was in black and white without sound.  This angered distributor Geffen and the DVDs were pulled from store shelves within days and replaced with a second edition.  The discs that contain the original black and white footage are considered collector’s items, selling for as much as $150.00 on EBay.  But, the saga of LITTLE SHOP does not end there!  In 1991, it became the plot of a short-lived animated television show titled LITTLE SHOP in which a nebbish junior-high student named Seymour owns a man-eating plant named Audrey Jr.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS 1986 trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUC1nnZy3E8

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS which began as a little movie whose director has so little faith in its survival that he didn’t even copyright it has become big business.  It was announced in April 2009 that Declan O’Brien (“Sharktopus,” “Wrong Turn: Bloody Beginnings”) would helm yet another remake of LITTLE SHOP.  However, in an interview with Bloody Disgusting.com, Declan declared his version “won’t be a musical ... it’s will be dark.”  As of this writing, Declan’s version is still on the back burner.  On May 4, 2012, Warner-Brothers announced it’s in the planning stages of a remake of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and has hired “Glee” co-producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (“Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark” and MGM/ Screen Gems remake of “Carrie”) to write the script.  Mark Platt (“Drive”) will co-produce.  In addition, Variety reports that THE DARK KNIGHT RISES star Joseph Gordon-Levitt is circling the lead role of nerdy Seymour Krelboyne.  With the producer of Fox’s hit TV series “Glee” helming, it’s a safe bet that this version will be a restyling of the 1986 Frank Oz musical version.  No date has been set yet for the principle shooting schedule and no actors have yet been cast.

Five decades have passed since Roger Corman decided to use some old standing sets to film a quickie movie, and what a phenomenon that quirky, dark comedy THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS has become!  Lauded by film critics ... Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 91% freshness rating ... and laughed at by millions of viewers, it’s been released with a commentary track by Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Michael J. Nelson and in 2009 was released by Rifftrax with Nelson and fellow MST3K cast members Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett.  Legend’s colorized version is also available from Amazon Video on Demand.  Apparently, there is no stopping the phenomenon that is THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS.

MSTjunkie

Bobbie's Movies to Look For: CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL

Title:  CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL

Year of Release—Film:  2012

Our story begins in 1954.  A young script-reader for Fox Studios, tired of reading and rejecting bad script after bad script, quit.  Cobbling together $28,000 from friends and relatives, he produced (and appeared in) a science fiction movie titled MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR.  Picked up for distribution by Lippert Pictures, it grossed $117,000.  By the end of the decade, that man directed or produced 30 more movies without losing a dime.  That man is Roger Corman.  His life and career is now examined in a new documentary from director Alex Stapleton, CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL.

CORMAN’S WORLD is a love letter.  A love letter signed by most of the directors and actors whose careers Corman jump-started throughout those early years, including Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Fonda, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Robert De Niro and David Carradine, Dick Miller, William Shatner, Quentin Tarantino, among others.  From his humble beginnings to present, Roger, with almost 400 films under his producer-director belt, is fondly lauded by his friends, fellow industry workers and family members.  Now, in his 86th year of life, Roger shows no sign of tiring, still working very much hands-on as a producer.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 1926, Roger William Corman at first followed in his father’s footsteps, studying engineering at Stanford College but, tiring of his chosen profession, he began to develop a budding interest in filmmaking.  He took a job as a messenger at Fox Studios, then became a story analyst and, in 1953, wrote a script titled “The House in the Sea” which was eventually filmed and released as HIGHWAY DRAGNET (1954).  Taking his pay for selling the script, he borrowed some more cash and made MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR (1954).  His next picture was THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (1955).  For this picture, shot for American Releasing, (which would soon become American International Pictures, or AIP), Corman convinced James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff to give him a three-picture deal.  He would go on to become it’s major talent behind the camera and make AIP the most profitable independent studio in cinema history!  Over the next 15 years, Roger made 53 pictures, mostly for AIP, and proved himself the godfather of quick, cheaply made productions.

CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL is an entertaining time capsule of a Hollywood outsider who went from the short shooting schedules and cheap special effects of the 1950’s Drive-in creature features through the Cold War days and man’s first steps into outer space through the so-called “Poe years” to biker movies.  He even had a brief foray into soft-corn porn movies.  The documentary includes film clips of him happily accepting his long-overdue 2009 lifetime achievement Academy Award and then on to his role as executive producer of DINOSHARK (2010).  CORMAN’S WORLD director Stapleton’s structure is fairly by the numbers but provides plenty of archival footage of now-deceased actor David Carradine, director George Hickenlooper and producer Polly Platt.

However, some of the interviews are odd.  Scorsese sits in his Manhattan screening room; Jack Nicholson reminisces on a sofa; Bruce Dern chats while getting a haircut; John Sayles relaxes on a stoop and Demme is shot sitting in the back seat of a car staring out a window.  Long-time actor and friend, Dick Miller, tells of the two-day shoot that was LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) while his wife, seated near, is more interested in the antics of her little dog.  And why is Ron Howard filmed walking down a street headed for a cemetery?  Also, Stapleton does not give the dates on any of the interviews, leaving the viewer to estimate a time frame.  However, this is fitting.  A movie about Roger Corman should look like a Roger Corman film.  Fast, cheap and a little rough around the edges.  This clip-crammed documentary is filled with Hollywood luminaries, all who seem to genuinely love this quiet, cardigan-wearing gentleman who gave them a chance when no others would.

CORMAN’S WORLD is insightful, informative and entertaining.  I wish there had been more bonus material added and they should have cleaned up some of the movie clips.  (The clip from APACHE WOMAN (1955), for example, looked like it was yanked straight off of Youtube!)  However, it was a fitting introduction to this great man who still reigns as the King of the quickie movie!  If watching CORMAN’S WORLD leaves you yearning for more of Corman’s world, may I suggest How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime by Roger Corman and Jim Jerome.  An excellent read that delves deeper into the life and times of Roger Corman, King of the B’s!

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzSD-qINVBM

Both available from Amazon.com.

Bobbie

DVD Review: PIRANHA (2010)

Title:  PIRANHA

Year of Release—Film:  2010

Year of Release—DVD:  2011

DVD Label:  Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

I will freely admit that there are times, more often than not, that the ol’ Unimonster’s not looking for a great movie (or even a good one, for that matter).  I just want to be entertained.  Sometimes that means giant bugs, sometimes it means ‘80’s Slasher Films.  And sometimes it means large-breasted young women; gratuitous nudity, violence and gore; and tasteless humor.  Sometimes it means a movie such as Alexandre Aja’s remake of the 1978 Roger Corman-produced classic PIRANHA.

 Less a remake of the original than a, to use the term currently in vogue, reinvention, Aja foregoes the “man tampering with nature” plot of Joe Dante’s original, in favor of a natural cause for the assault of millions of carnivorous fish on a lake full of partiers.

It’s a pleasant spring day on Lake Victoria, Arizona.  An elderly fisherman, Matthew Boyd (Richard Dreyfuss, in a nice little tribute to his role in JAWS thirty-five years previously), is in a rowboat, drifting along, line in the water.  A small earthquake shakes the area, opening up, deep below the water’s surface, a huge fissure.  A whirlpool forms near Boyd’s boat, drawing it in as thousands of strange fish swim upward from the fissure.  The angler is tossed into the raging water, only to be torn to shreds as the fish swarm around him.  The lake quickly returns to its normally placid state, the only indication of anything extraordinary having occurred being the now-empty rowboat—and Boyd’s arm, bloody, flesh stripped from the bones, upthrust from the water.

In another part of the lake, hordes of college kids are descending upon the small community.  It is Spring Break, and Lake Victoria is renowned as a party destination.  Everywhere one looks are drunken college boys and lovely college girls, all ready to have the time of their lives.  Through this mass of humanity a young man on a motorbike can be seen, carefully navigating his way around knots of dancing, stumbling partiers.  This is Jake (Steven R. McQueen), and as much as he would like to join in the festivities, he’s on a mission: to collect his little sister from her music lesson.

He finds her waiting for him in the company of Danni (Kelly Brook), a stunningly beautiful young woman.  As fate would have it, she is a Wild, Wild Girl—one of the stars of a series of videos that feature naked, nubile women behaving, well… wildly.  The brainchild of a weasely character named Derrick (Jerry O’Connell), one of the videos is being produced during the Spring Break activities.  Derrick hires Jake to act as location scout for the production, a guide who knows his way around the lake.

That night, Sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue), who happens to be Jake’s mother, is investigating Matt Boyd’s disappearance.  His boat has been found by Fallon (Ving Rhames), one of her deputies, but there was no sign of the missing man.  As Julie reaches from the dock to the boat, she falls in the water, coming up with the body of Matt Boyd.

The body appears to have been in the water for several days, rather than hours.  It’s obvious to both officers that whatever did this to the old man—it wasn’t something to which they were accustomed.  Julie’s first instinct is to close the lake, a lake that, in a few short hours, will play host to a hundred thousand Spring Break revelers.  A hundred thousand potential victims—of something unknown to the Sheriff.

The latest in a string of hits for “splat-pack” member Aja, following on the heels of 2008’s MIRRORS, PIRANHA’s strength lies in its total abandonment of any pretense of being a worthwhile or meaningful film.  It’s pure exploitation, 100-percent no-holds-barred ‘70’s-era Drive-In movie.  It fulfills every tenet of Joe Bob Briggs’ requirement for a good Drive-In Movie: Boobs, Blood, and Beasts.  The script, by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is adequate—don’t expect Shakespeare and you won’t be disappointed.  Aja’s direction has improved with each outing, from HAUTE TENSION, to THE HILLS HAVE EYES, to MIRRORS, and now with PIRANHA.  He has a firm grasp of what modern Horror fans want to see, and the ability to bring that to the screen.

The DVD release is nice, thin on bonus features but that, unfortunately, is becoming the trend, as distributors save the bonuses for Blu-ray releases.  The one bonus is a good one, however—Don’t Scream, Just Swim: Behind-the-Scenes of PIRANHA 3D.  At a runtime of 91 minutes, it’s actually 3 minutes longer than the movie it examines.  It’s full of the ‘making-of’ details that I love, and is enjoyable in its own right.

PIRANHA isn’t going to please everyone; in fact, even a lot of Horror fans may find it over-the-top.  But sometimes you’re in the mood for over-the-top—sometimes you’re in the mood for Boobs, Blood, and Beasts.  And PIRANHA delivers, in spades.