Monday, November 5, 2012

Jason goes to a special Halloween Bad Movie Night--PIRANHA 3-D

I went out last Wednesday (aka Halloween, aka my birthday) evening. Wanted to see a film that was good. Instead I ended up at the Aquarium of the Bay, the people there were...actually pretty friendly.

Okay, if you don't know the Bad Movie Night theme song, you don't get the joke. No matter, the important thing is for one special night they had a much larger theater, a different kind of audience, and made fun of a 3-D movie with actual polarized 3-D glasses (instead of the blue/red ones, which has been done at least once at the Dark Room.) And that movie was PIRANHA 3-D.

I've actually reviewed PIRANHA 3-D before, and thought I did a pretty good job. But this time I saw it as a post-modern feminism story. The main hero is a woman (Elisabeth Shue.) Nearly all men are either reprehensible (Jerry O'Connell and his crew,) weird (Christopher Lloyd) or a minority (Ving Rhames.) Of Elisabeth Shue's children, her daughter is the preternaturally smart and responsible one, even making fun of her older brother for staring at a chick's boobs.

And that, of course, is the tricky point with calling this a feminist movie--all the boobs. A typical reading would say this is a juvenile male fantasy where women are sexually promiscuous and then get punished for it. But clearly, the audience is punished more than the women (who get to leave the movie.) In fact, it has reversed and subverted expectations by punishing the men in the audience for wanting to look at boobs.

Either that or it's just so bad that I didn't even enjoy looking at boobs by well before the midpoint.

Running Time: 88 minutes
My Total Minutes: 302,170

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