Tag: Piranha 3D

French writer-director Alexandre Aja has a succinct and pithy way to describe his new horror movie, “Piranha 3D”: ” ‘Gremlins’ for adults.” That might surprise anyone who has seen the 10 minutes of leaked footage from Aja’s movie making the rounds on the Internet, in which a school of hungry prehistoric fish takes a serious bite out of a debauched spring-break party at  fictional Lake Victoria. At one point, a support cable holding up a floating riser comes loose and careens through the air, slicing through a woman’s blue bikini top and severing her torso; the upper half of her body is seen sinking into the depths of the bloody water. And she’s just one of dozens of scantily clad revelers who meet with a gruesome end under a blindingly bright azure sky. If memory serves, nothing like that happened in ...

Dennis Lim recently revisited a 1979 classic to see if it still has bite. Here’s an excerpt from his Los Angeles Times article: Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” which opened 35 years ago this summer, is often credited — or blamed — for inventing the modern blockbuster: the art form, or rather economic model, that brought with it tentpole releases and long summers of big, expensive, aggressively hyped movies. But in its immediate wake, the influence of “Jaws” could be felt on a more literal level. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a string of shockers that were designed with varying degrees of shamelessness to exploit the fear of carnivorous aquatic life: among many others, ” Mako: The Jaws of Death” (1976), “Tentacles” (1977), “Orca” (1977), “Barracuda” (1978) and “Great White” (1981), not to mention the string of “Jaws” sequels that ...