Sunday, July 26, 2009

SCHOOL'S OUT (1999)

A small group of teenagers break into a high school for some after hours shenanigans. The shenanigans never happen because a dork with large scissors starts stabbing everybody. Boring stuff happens and the Final Girl escapes, but within a few days she steals a gun off a cop and goes hunting for the person who killed her friends.  Yawn.

It’s difficult to have any feelings (positive or negative) about SCHOOL’S OUT because it’s such a nothing movie. The story is older than your grandpappy’s dick, the cast is so blah that nobody stood out, the lighting sucked, the setting sucked, the camerawork really sucked and the story! What the fuck? At multiple points, somebody had the killer in a position where they could easily kill him but didn’t. It was extremely frustrating. No gore, very little blood, zero nudity, overly complicated story…outside of looking for something to laugh at with friends I cannot see any reason why anybody would like this film. Skip it with a vengeance and never look back.

Part 2 - Dead Island: School's Out 2 (2001)

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)