…It wasn’t Manos.
Hellraiser began life as short story titled The Hellbound Heart (Check it out, it’s worth reading) and was later adapted by its Author for the screen. It’s a curious oddity that means more watching it as an Adult than it did when I was a kid.
So here we are. It’s the first day of October and like Richard Gere with a Gerbil I thought I’d ease into it. Larry Cohen is probably most well known these days as the writer of Phone Booth. But to genre fans (And fans of film in general) he was also known as the Man who brought us Q: The Winged Serpent (The ‘Q’ of the title stands for Quetzacoatl, which probably gave the marketing department a seizure), Black Ceaser and this little gem.
Directed by Alexandra Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors)
Piranha 3D is the best film about Piranha made in 3D you’re ever likely to see. In fact I’d hazard a guess and say it’s the best film about killer Piranha ever made. This is including Piranha 2 (Where the fish can FLY!). Though I have a lot of love for Joe Dante’s original film, which in itself was a rip-off of Jaws, so much so in fact that the film was nearly buried by Universal studios until Steven Spielberg himself convinced them not to. That film was a sly, winking nod of a film that knew it was capitalising on the, ahem, monster success of Spielbergs film whereas 2010’s version is something different entirely, It’s a slasher film that has the Piranha as the slasher, so rather than being a riff on the ‘science gone mad!’ conceit of most monster movies, Aja’s Piranha 3D revels in the blood, nudity and occasional comedy of the better slasher films. For instance, there’s really no need to have an extended sequence of Kelly Brook and pornstar Riley Steele swim around underwater totally nude, but it very much fits the tone of what Aja was going for. It’s not particulary arousing (Though if I were 15 it would probably be the greatest sequence in the history of Cinema) but it is audacious, and very very funny.
Is This Thing On? 