Trash, post-trash, and meta-trash: "Piranha" and "Piranha 3D"

Who was the last completely unself-conscious American exploitation filmmaker who was any good? As in, who turned out to be a genuine artist but couldn't really be said to have been in the least bit fussy about it, if you follow me? George A. Romero? Let's, just for the sake of this particular argument, say George A. Romero. (UPDATE: Phil Freeman's comment below compels me to clarify here: I mean the Romero of Night of the Living Dead, which I place in the tradition of Carnival of Souls; not, finally, the Romero of, say, the very self-conscious Land of the Dead or even the more immediate Dead sequels. And by unself-conscious I do not mean "not smart." Again, just to clarify.)Because it's an interesting thing. It's not much written about, but the world of low-budget, exploitation movies did get its own version of what some call the "movie brats" working within its ranks to a slightly different purpose than the guys who had come out of those ranks in the late '60s and early-to-mid '70s. Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and a bunch of other vital American cineastes had come up out of the Corman system, and once they were out, their replacements were a talented but somewhat more self-conscious breed. Where someone like Scorsese would try to bring genuine self-expression to a genre piece while hewing closely to both the conventions of the genre and his producer's predilection, a director such as Joe Dante got his personal rocks off by sending up genre pictures from within in order to make slyly subversive satirical points.

As the economic rationale for the B picture began to implode, and as what were once considered B pictures started being accorded a certain amount of critical respect...and the ranks of production houses began to fill with more knowledgable "movie brats," the exploitation picture began to change. To lose its innocence, as it were...although I understand that's a strange way to put it. Obviously a theory along these lines has to cover a lot more than the Corman "system," as it takes in filmmakers such as John Carpenter and David Cronenberg as well. But it's with the guys who worked for Corman that the self-consciousness of making a "trash" picture took on a particular, affectionately flippant character. The seeds of this character were, of course, there long before, as manifested in such comedy/horror hybrid "classics" as Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. But they come to something of a full flower in a picture such as Dante's 1978 Piranha, an obvious-and-loving-it rip from Spielberg's Jaws, one of whose opening scenes features a "Mr. Patrick Hobby" being called to an airport courtesy phone, casts kevin McCarthy in a hysterical more-or-less reprise of his Invasion of the Body Snatchers role, and features scream queen and Fellini muse Barbara Steele intoning such lines as "fish genetics is a very small field" with an exemplarily straight face. 

It is perhaps no accident that the self-conscious exploitation film, or what I'll call for the purposes of this piece the post-trash film, really started to flower around the time that critics began taking the exploitation film seriously. On the highbrow/academic end, there was Robin Wood with his explorations of what he and his fellows called "The American Nightmare;" on a different end of what I never recognized as a particularly valid hierarchy anyway, there was Michael Weldon with his Psychotronic ' 'zine, and later the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, and Bill Landis with Sleazoid Express. Roger Ebert had done some spadework in the mainstream media, and J. Hoberman and David Edelstein did their part in the ostensible "alternative" press. There wasn't necessarily a shared language among these voices—I remember setting up an introduction between Weldon and Edelstein back in the mid-80s, and the two just kinda seemed not to really get each other—but between them they all got the word out that this stuff wasn't just for dumb kids and adult flashers or what have you.

Separate from post-trash, in my mind, is meta-trash, which films tend to take off from the likes of inadvertent (possibly) but nonetheless inarguable pieces of "authentic sadistic cinema," to use Roebert Benayoun's acute phrase. The kind of grindhouse stuff that was so over the line that you wondered who the sicko was who came up with this shit. It is again no accident that most such pictures involve violence against women, and two touchstones in my own personal canon, such as it is, are the gruesome original cut of Fernando Di Leo's 1978 To Be Twenty, in which two post-counter-culture chicks who could be prototypes for Sex and the City characters cavort and tease their way through what seems a slightly-hotter-than-usual softcore Euro sex comedy, until they meet an unbelievably brutal end in a genuinely shocking out-of-left-field finale; and Aldo Lado's 1975 Night Train Murders, a sexually gruesome shameless Last House on the Left rip with none of the, um, redeeming social value. One could cite Lucio Fulci's 1990 A Cat In The Brain, a sort of grindhouse Stardust Memories, in which Fulci stars as himself, trying to figure out just why he makes fucked-up movies like The New York Ripper, as a sort of meta-trash milestone. But as the pictures of Eli Roth have demonstrated, meta-trash is a kind of vexed subgenre; the lengths to which something such as Hostel 2 goes to to reassure its audience that its maker himself isn't really twisted, he's just seen a lot of twisted movies, does nothing to assuage those who would condemn it. Which means it ends up perhaps more "authentic" than Roth actually intends it. Tarantino grapples with this problem a lot more effectively disturbingly in the first half of his Death Proof. But anyway. 

The most surprising thing (at least for me) about Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D is that it's more of a post-trash picture than a meta-trash picture. Given that Aja's best film up to this point, his 2003 High Tension, is, among other things, a meta-trash exercise that winkingly, in its snooty French way, invites audiences to ponder just how homophobic it actually is, and given that Aja had, prior to this, demonstrated precisely zero sense of humor, I expected mostly a lot of eye-popping but sour, crass gore. Now there is a lot of crass gore here, of more later. But the tone, established with an opening that has Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss serving a similar function to McCarthy's in the Dante original, recaptures the affectionate flippancy I cited above very, very well. This continues in the casting department; good God, I'm so old that for a minute I thought that Elizabeth Shue, playing the very beset Sheriff of an Arizona lake resort town now besieged by future fish food in the form of spring breakers, was Cheryl Ladd. Ving Rhames and Christopher Lloyd I recognized right away. That the movie gives with one hand—providing almost overly generous amounts of Page Three girl and porn star nudity (see below—the blonde is Riley Steel, the highlighted brunette Kelly Brooke, and guess which is which)—and takes away with the other—making one of the main human villains an incredibly obnoxious Joe-Francis-style teen-boobie mongerer (Jerry O'Connell is very good here)—is neither, pace A.O. Scott, indicative of the film's to his mind deplorable "insouciant hypocrisy," nor, Eric Kohn, does it make the film "a scathing indictment of America's increasingly blatant obsession with dirty sex." (Jeez, dude, next time why don't you try "a puckish satire of contemporary mores?")  It's only just Aja hewing to, and taking full advantage of, the perquisites of the genre, and rather effectively amusingly so, at that. I don't understand why this is so hard for people to grasp. And yes, the penis bit near the end is sub-sub John Waters, but do you really think nobody making the film knew that, or knew that Waters himself is likely to heartily approve of the 3D gloss they threw on the gag?

As I took note of in a post below, the mounting gore at the movie's climax apparently made Christopher Campbell cry, which, as you see, I think is kind of weirdly funny given the cultural condition we all share. Maybe I should lend the sprite To Be Twenty, and give him something to really cry about. I really wasn't too terribly bothered by it; but on the other hand, I think it's probably good to be unsettled by something we've been more or less conditioned to chortle at, out of repressed fear or not. Don't you? Could be an entry point into some meaningful self-examination. In any event, at the screening I went to—a not even half-full Sunday matinee at the Court Street Regal multiplex—the crowd, such as it was, was more grossed out by the fledgling teen romance between the two young leads than by anybody getting sliced in half. What a world, what a world.

Comments

[bstrong]

Oh man, how I want to see this movie!

"Who was the last completely unself-conscious American exploitation filmmaker who was any good?"

To answer your question, I was going to bring up the holy (to me) trinity—Carpenter, Dante, Cronenberg—but then you went ahead and did it for me. I once wrote about Carpenter and said this: "What's distinctive about Carpenter is how enthusiastically he embraces the hokiest conventions of the genres he works in. His films are cheeky, but not ironic. He has never, no matter the context, shied away from a gunfight or car chase. Indeed, Carpenter’s approach to zombies, psychopaths, aliens, and vampires is to take them all dead seriously as subjects."

I wonder if even some of Brian DePalma's films can be put into this category. I mean they are very, very self-conscious, bordering on the meta-, but they also deliver the goods. For example, I find Dressed to Kill both hilarious as a send-up of slasher movies but also genuinely scary.

[Phil Freeman]

I haven't finished reading the post yet, but had to stop after the first paragraph and jump in. Romero is almost CRIPPLINGLY self-conscious. I wouldn't necessarily call him an "exploitation" filmmaker, but I'd argue for Walter Hill as an unheralded genre master...and totally un-self-conscious. There's no way you can be self-conscious when making a movie like Extreme Prejudice, which I wrote about some years ago here:

http://runningthevoodoodown.blogspot.com/2005/05/cowboy-poetry.html

[Castle Bravo]

I failed to see a mention of Tobe Hooper's '74 Texas Chain Saw Massacre... One of the 10 greatest works of art ever committed to celluloid.

[Glenn Kenny]

Very astute, Castle Bravo. You DID fail to see a mention of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Because I didn't mention it. I, too, believe it's a great movie, and it is in fact one of the films central to Wood's writing on genre. I didn't mention it in this context because I didn't want to get into too much hair-splitting in the post proper.

Sigh.

"Ya...ya...ya DAMN FOOL! Ya RUINED THE THREAD!"

[haice]

Corman's system imploded when THE RAMONES were slipped into what was suppose to be a disco exploitation film.

[Craig Kennedy]

Post-trash or meta-trash, it's still trash. Aja has no facility for humor or eroticism so the opening hour of shits and giggles is a punishing slog. Even the widely ballyhooed underwater lesballet is outclassed by anything at all on Skinamax.

Aja finally seems to be in his element when things get grimly brutal in the last third, but by then it's too late.

This was also my first experience with 3D post-conversion and it was as terrible as advertised. The problem is, even with the poor execution, the gimmick actually adds a much needed layer of fun so the only choice is to see it in bad 3D or skip it altogether.

[Chris O.]

: I think it's probably good to be unsettled by something we've been more or less conditioned to chortle at, out of repressed fear or not

Right. Where's Willman on THE EXPENDABLES, which was #1 for two weeks in a row? Mass killings? Check. Blood? Digital, yeah, but check. Violence towards women? Check. Bad cosmetic surgery? Check. And so on.

Of course, it's called a "self-conscious homage", but... you wonder.

But speaking of those from the Corman camp... then there's the from-the-grindhouse-to-the-arthouse career of John Sayles, writer of the original PIRANHA, whose films maybe got more from Corman's lessons in stretching a budget than in genre conventions (script doctoring notwithstanding). That's not to say there's no genre cross-breeding or experimentation.

[Paul Johnson]

"Who was the last completely unself-conscious American exploitation filmmaker who was any good?"

He was Canadian, so he really doesn't count, but Bob Clark comes to mind, especially for Black Christmas from 1974 (or even Dead of Night - which, for all its loaded evocations of Vietnam, seems more of a piece with The Sadist or Brain That Wouldn't Die than with The Crazies).

I see '74 as the no turning back moment in American horror & exploitation, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Phantom of the Paradise/It's Alive making the kind of hard'n'heavy ironic turn that echoes the post-Raw Power/New York Dolls/Radio City moment in rock, after which everything worth paying attention to seems like a commentary on that which came before - especially John Carpenter's movies, which for all their stripped down purity are supremely self-conscious (Assault on Precinct 13 = the Ramones debut album?).

[bill]

Well, this is probably the most interesting review of PIRANHA 3D any of us is likely to read. Savor it.

Not that I've seen it, but I want to now more than I did before.

" think it's probably good to be unsettled by something we've been more or less conditioned to chortle at, out of repressed fear or not. Don't you?"

Indeed I do. The absence of this has been my problem with the horror genre, as it exists on film, for a loooong time now. I cringe any time I see a critic say something like "Finally, a horror film that's funny!" As if that was an obvious element to the genre that people had forgotten about. And I know it CAN be an element, and I'm sure Aja's film is loaded with jokes, but the idea
that he might use that humor to smack us in the face at the end appeals to me.

And I think Cronenber is the "last" kind of filmmaker you describe, still and always. Mainly because he's still good, and while his genres have shifted lately, he's still nailing down some damn good work in theoretically exploitation genres. And he's always been the smartest of them all anyway.

Of the type you seem to be thinking of more specifically, I'd go with Carpenter. That man was a true craftsman. What happened?

[The First Bill C]

@Paul: Bob Clark was not Canadian. He often worked in Canada, where the tax-shelter money was and where he built up something of a rep company, but he was born in New Orleans and grew up in Florida.

While I'm being pedantic, it's Elisabeth Shue, Glenn, with an "s."

[Mr. Peel]

In this context I suppose the Patrick Hobby joke actually began with Dante/Arkush's HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, used as the pseudonym for screenwriter Danny Opatashu.

I would make some comment regarding my appreciation for Kelly Brook in PIRANHA 3D but that would probably be too off-topic, so I'll just add that this was an excellent piece.

[Mark Slutsky]

You know what? I'm getting kind of tired of people taking potshots at the HOSTEL movies whenever they need a "torture porn" whipping boy. Hostel 1—and weirdly enough, especially 2—are smart movies, very well made, with a pretty solid satirical bent. They really deserve better.

[D.P.]

Isn't, uh, Cronenberg also Canadian?

[Partisan]

Having seen six of Carpenter's movies, I'm inclined to think he's overrated. "The Thing" is the best of those I've seen, but quite frankly I don't think cinema would be worse off if "Halloween" had never existed. Many critics don't like Woody Allen for remaking Bergman and Fellini, so why should Carpenter get so much praise for remaking "Rio Bravo"? A cynical observer, or John Simon, might think Carpenter was being rewarded more for knowing the prejudices of a certain type of film critic than for being a good filmmaker (Hawks is more admired, Carpenter isn't being too "intellectual"). He had more Hollywood opportunities of many American filmamakers of his decade (cough, Charles Burnett, cough), and he blew it.

It's striking that two years after Carpenter made this movie, Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bermgan made their own movies about murderers, which tended not to be admired by Carpenter's or De Palma's fans. I've never seen "The Life of the Marionettes," but I hope to sometime in the next two months. Any thoughts about it?

One thing about "The Phantom of the Paradise," which I saw at least a quarter of a century after it was released, is that it's so weird having the Andy Warhol/Malcolm McLaren figure played by Paul Williams making his fortune with a version of "Grease." Yes, I know McLaren hadn't come to prominence then, but he is the person one would think of for this kind of role in retrospect.

[bill]

HALLOWEEN was a remake of RIO BRAVO?

[bill]

D. P. - Oops, yes, he is.

[Kiss Me, Son of God]

I mostly enjoyed Piranha 3D, but I thought the third act represented somewhat of a failure of nerve on the filmmakers' part -- whether the previous hour had been post-trash or meta-trash isn't for me to say, but it was a lot of fun, and then much less fun as it became a more conventional survivalist drama hinging upon e.g. the audience giving a shit about the welfare of the protagonist's moppet siblings. Of course, I was delighted by the picture's coda (and final shot) -- a wry, nasty wink that reminded me of Raimi's Drag Me To Hell.

Also of some interest is the fake 3D, which had the effect of looking accidentally avant-garde in some shots. It almost looked like a commentary on bad 3D. Almost.

[Kiss Me, Son of God]

Bill, I assume Partisan was referring to Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13," which was loosely modeled after Rio Bravo...but that is not very clear in Partisan's post, so perhaps he's confused himself...

[Craig Kennedy]

KMSoG: Just for clarification, are you disappointed with the smaller scale climax on the party boat or are you disappointed in the grim mass killing part?

[christian]

Partisan, please.

[Jeff McMahon]

It has to depend on which 6 Carpenter movies you've seen. If they included Village of the Damned/Escape from L.A./Vampires, he might have a point. If, in addition to Halloween and The Thing, they included Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live it would be a different story.

[Jeff McMahon]

Also, on the subject of 'good recent unself-conscious exploitation filmmakers' I'd like to nominate Larry Fessenden and David Twohy.

[Asher Steinberg]

"Many critics don't like Woody Allen for remaking Bergman and Fellini, so why should Carpenter get so much praise for remaking "Rio Bravo"? A cynical observer, or John Simon, might think Carpenter was being rewarded more for knowing the prejudices of a certain type of film critic than for being a good filmmaker (Hawks is more admired, Carpenter isn't being too "intellectual")"

Well, I don't see the point in remaking Bergman and Fellini. Now, I'm going to admit before I make my foregoing comments that I haven't seen as much of either as I should, so the following could be ignorant. But it strikes me that Bergman's films are already commentaries on themselves; it's very hard for me to see what remaking Bergman adds to Bergman. And to me Fellini is a stylist first and foremost, so to remake Fellini is to style-ape. Hawks, on the other hand, is, in some respects, a stylistically bare filmmaker who tells these powerful archetypal stories in very genre-specific contexts, such that you can retell RIO BRAVO in different eras, turn it from a Western into a existentialist neo-noir as Melville does in parts of LE CERCLE ROUGE, a police procedural, any manner of things. And each time (if you actually do a good job), you won't be making a homage to your favorite filmmaker, as Bergman/Fellini remakes necessarily are, but will be saying something new about the situation. That's how I see it, anyway.

[jbryant]

I was gonna mention Twohy as well, Jeff, but thought I should hold off until I've seen A PERFECT GETAWAY.

Asher: It's not a remake exactly, but AMERICAN GRAFFITI owes a lot to I VITELLONI without being Felliniesque, per se. And I haven't seen Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, but I'm assuming the only thing Bergmanesque about it is the plot. But your general point is well taken.

[PaulJBis]

About Bergman's "Of the life of the marionettes": it's an AWESOME film, and by awesome I mean sick, bleak and hopeless. Don't miss it. (I don't think it has much to do with the slasher genre, though).

[Kiss Me, Son of God]

Craig: the smaller-scale boat part, more or less. Felt more conventional Hollywood thriller, less gonzo exploitation.

[Fuzzy Bastard]

Jesus! Self-conscious exploitation aside...

"please don't ever write anything ever again Eric Kohn,"
"made poor widdle Christopher Campbell cry,"

And then you wonder why your comments become a home for poop-throwing insult monkeys? I know, insulting other critics is part of your brand, but these swipes aren't even funny. Everything else in this piece is interesting and thoughtful, but then there's these sentences where a mean 8-year-old suddenly takes over your word processor.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Fuzzy: Wow, man. Just as Gamera is a friend to all children, you appear to be a friend to all potentially aggrieved film reviewers. If I didn't know better I'd think you were canvassing for votes, as it were. Actually, I don't know better.

A few points: One, I don't really "wonder why," at all; two, your own notions of causality, in my opinion, lack; three, parallel construction jokes are apparently lost on you; and four, pshaw!—I went very, very easy on the tender-hearted Mr. Campbell and his ludicrous bleat.

I grow weary, sometimes, of having to repeat this fact: this is my blog. I'll write as I please on it, and deal with the consequences, such as they are. Including tolerating tedious, humorless prigs.

[Fuzzy Bastard]

Canvasing for votes? For what? I'm not a professional reviewer, and have no ambitions to be such. As for my own film work, given that I'm here under a pseudonym, can't see how that would have an impact. I just find it depressing watching you torpedo your own work by giving in to your very worst instincts, is all.

As for humorless, well, if you really think "poor widdle so-and-so" is funny, enjoy cackling over noogies in the boys' room.

[James Keepnews]

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is astonishingly good Bergman -- the last "good German" one from his years as a tax exile, just like Mick and Keef -- and I'm surprised how rarely discussed it remains among his films. While not a slasher film per se, it examines the aftermath of a "passion" murder with a willingness to explore its multidirectional tragic consequences an unblinking eye. And as far as those slasher elements go, the opening scenes features a shot that is held for an almost unbearably long time as you await the inevitable -- I can't think of another shot (or entire film, really) quite like it in Bergman's oeuvre, and it truly belongs more to the tradition of horror film than Bergman's sui generis anti-trash. Don't believe it's ever seen the light of NTSC DVD, has it?

Carpenter: I like DARK STAR, THE THING, THEY LIVE and most esp. ELVIS, which I'm happy to see is now available in a new DVD. Me no like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, which my teenage pals and I could not stop ridiculing when we watched it, and thereafter ("Gotta smoke?" Gotta non-cliched line of dialogue? No? Right...And would we ever forgive him for offing Kim Richards?), and most of his films after IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. In fact, us junior cinephiles did not recognize the auteurist-stroking reference to RIO BRAVO in ASSAULT, so much as the (for us) more obvious reference to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, against which it suffered greatly by comparison. And continues to.