Sunday, July 26, 2009

PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING (1981)

[Update 10/22/2018: I promise to fix this review one day. I have no idea when.]

Ahhhh yeah!!!! All of your favorite piranhas are back in town! You got Bitey, Nibbler, Toecutter, Copernicus Jr., Evil Professor Doomsmurf, Scooty Puff, Beaker, Sparkle, Fifthwheel, Brown Cloud, The Larry, Citizen Balls, Whisker Biscuit, Chompers, Three Bean Queef, After You Clean Your Diarrhea, Slappy, Menlo Schwartzer, Rumple Fforeskin, Daniel Bean Boone, Egbert Rumpus Bumpus, The Fucker, Stewmaster McPhatcock, Chad Farthouse, Gorilla Thunder Monkey, Inspector Underwear, Skidmark and introducing the new piranha: Sir-Flies-A-Little (With the Help of Wires)! Imagine how excited I was!!! So I crammed the disc in the trusty ol' Oppo and the first thing I noticed was how shitty the picture looks. The second thing I noticed was this movie sucks total balls!

The first movie was just ok (it had an awesome poster also), so you would have thought that I learned my lesson, but no I go into Part 2 thinking about how promising that poster looks and...it's crap.  Very little action, mostly shot in the dark and the shots of the wire-flying piranhas are so quick you can barely even see what's going on.  Very disappointing.

The only saving grace in this clusterfuck is it has an early performance by Lance Henriksen.  Skip it.

Original - Piranha (1978)
Remake - Piranha (1995)
Reboot 1 - Piranha 3D (2010)
Reboot sequel - Piranha 3DD (2012)

PIRANHA (1978)

"Lost River Lake...terror, horror, death.  Film at 11."

Two idiot hikers break into a fenced-in facility that's clearly posted as "No Trespassing".  They see a huge tank of liquid and jump in. It could have been a pool full of giraffe urine, but these fuckers don't care, they're here to par-tay.  Ends up, instead of giraffe urine, it was actually full of mutated and highly aggressive piranhas.

An investigator is sent to find the two idiots, so (being an idiot as well) she also breaks into the facility and without consulting anybody, drains the pool into a nearby river! (In my opinion, that makes her responsible for every single person that got killed or injured by the piranhas.) Anyway, so now the fish are loose and they're hungry as Hell.  They just eat the fuck out of everybody for the rest of the movie. They even somehow kill a dude who was sitting on a dock with his feet in the water. Hint: pull your goddamn feet out of the water!

Blood, zero CGI special effects, brief titties, funky 70's bodies, humorous attack scenes, the word piranha pronounced as pran-yah, Phil Tippett getting eaten by pran-yah, Paul Bartel getting bit in the face by a pran-yah, okay acting, some dude who looks like it's going to take him three days to blow up his pool lounger, Lone Star Beer and as with most Roger Corman films from this period you can literally spend hours on IMDb looking at the cast and crew.  For example, look up the guy on the water skies or the woman at the rental car desk.  And I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you who director Joe Dante is.

Part 2 - Piranha II: The Spawning (1981)
Remake - Piranha (1995)
Reboot 1 - Piranha 3D (2010)
Reboot sequel - Piranha 3DD (2012)

MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (2008)

[Update 03/08/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

What is the point of this movie? Does it even take place in our universe or in some alternate reality where extremely dumb shit is commonplace? From what I can tell, there's this "midnight" train that leaves every night at, uh, 2:06 A.M. and every night this dude attacks the last few passengers with a large hammer until CGI blood shoots out all over the place. The train drives on to a hidden location then the driver and the killer feed the corpses to some monsters. Why? What? How? What the fuck? That's stupid. Wouldn't you think the police would become interested when the same train has multiple disappearances every fucking night?! Yeah, there's this one lone copper that's in cahoots with the murderers, but how can she cover up the hundreds of murders all by herself?

Alright lets just forget the ignorant story for a minute and concentrate on the violence...it sucks. The killer never says a word and his only facial expression is the "I'm trying to hold in a giant fart" expression. He has zero screen presence and he's not scary. Also, his weapon is stupid: a giant shiny hammer.  Jason from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 would slaughter the fuck out of this guy in 5 seconds!

Honestly I cannot think of any reason to ever watch this movie. It's unoriginal, slow and has no personality. There is nothing here that you haven't already seen before. If you need me, I'll be in my room listening to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".