"Aja hits us with a crescendo of mayhem that just keeps on going and going and going. What separates this sequence, in which the film’s prehistoric fish go to town on hundreds of partying co-eds attending a wet t-shirt contest, from the rest of the obviously silly movie is how real and traumatic it appears. I’m not alone in noticing the change in tone.
I’ve seen comments on the web likening it to watching footage from an actual disaster. Sure, there’s some level of humor to be had in watching a girl fall into two halves while being carried out of the water, but in context I am slightly disturbed. I think part of it comes from how extensive and explicit the violence is in this bloodbath. First of all, we see less of the cartoonish CGI piranhas at this point. It’s mostly just the victims, many with patches of skin and limbs missing. Second, there are a lot of deaths and injury that come not from the fish but from other humans in panic. Also, we see more survivors in critical condition who’ve nearly escaped, even if for just seconds on a boat or beach where they’ll probably bleed to death, screaming and crying and twitching from shock, as though we’re seeing the aftermath of a bombing or plane crash or earthquake. I can appreciate the need to remind people that in certain traumatic disasters even survivors are often left in bad shape, physically and psychologically. I just wasn’t expecting such a reminder with a B-movie about killer fish." — Christopher Campbell, "Piranha 3D": When Horror Turns To Trauma, Spout blog,August 23, 2010
"After the breakdown of the detective story in the books of Edgar Wallace, which seemed by their less rational construction, their unsolved riddles and their crude exaggeration to ridicule their readers, and yet in so doing magnificently anticipated the collective imago of total terror, the type of murder comedy has come into being. While continuing to claim to make fun of a bogus awe, it demolishes the images of death. It presents the corpse as what it has become, a stage prop. It still looks human and is yet a thing, as in the film 'A Slight Case of Murder,' where corpses are continuously transported to and fro, allegories of what they already are. Comedy savours to the full the false abolition of death that Kafka had long before described in panic in the story of Gracchus the hunter; for the same reason, no doubt, music too is starting to become comic. What the National Socialists perpetrated against millions of people, the parading and patterning of the living like dead matter, then the mass-production and cost-cutting of death, threw its prefiguring shadow on those who felt moved to chortle over corpses. What is decisive is the absorption of biological destruction by conscious social will. Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people. Rilke's prayer for 'one's own death' is a piteous attempt to conceal the fact that nowadays people merely snuff out."—Theodor Adorno, "Knackery," Minima Moralia, first edition 1951, translation E.F.N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978
Oh man. Never stop blogging.
Posted by: Mark Slutsky | August 23, 2010 at 06:47 PM
To write poetry after Piranha 3-d is barbaric.
Posted by: Evelyn Roak | August 23, 2010 at 11:25 PM