It's been banned from Comic Con - or so producers would like you to believe. Its female star is on the cover of the current edition of Playboy while the male lead is the focal point of a threatened lawsuit from the creator of Girls Gone Wild. Eli Roth, currently doing press for a completely different film, has been telling anyone who will listen that it has the most blood on screen in the history of cinema. It goes into wide release tomorrow and yet nobody seems to have seen it. The film is Piranha 3D, from director Alexandre Aja and normally when a film opening this big (2500 screens) is held back from advance screenings it has critics and observant fans concluding, usually correctly, that it must be horrible. But nobody's doing that here. And here's why.
Recognizing quite correctly that they're dealing with what is essentially a critic-proof movie the big brains at Dimension Films have chosen to ignore the critics, instead mounting one of the most effective grassroots whisper campaigns of recent days to get the only people that matter - the paying fans - talking. From the outside it may have looked like chaos from time to time but make no mistake: this is tightly controlled, highly organized chaos.
Right from the beginning this was designed to be an exercise in guilty pleasure excess. It is a film about angry, hungry, piranha, after all. And the first decision made by director Alexandre Aja was if you're going to go there, go there big. So we get the 3D, we get buckets of blood, and we get - by all accounts - wave after wave of breasty women in and out of bikinis. This is lowest common denominator film making but gleefully so, rather than cynically, and the initial announcements were met with an enthusiastic response, one made even more so by the casting of a mix of genre favorites and actual good actors. But it was when the marketing campaign really kicked in that things got interesting.
Appearing unannounced and unexplained the first big volley of Piranha 3D marketing came in the form of the website for Wild Wild Girls, a site clearly modeled after Girls Gone Wild meaning it is filled with images and videos of breasty college aged women baring their assets for the camera. It's raunchy. It's dirty. And if you pay attention you'll notice that it is sponsored by a non-existent "Piranha" energy drink while Piranha 3D stars Eli Roth - who plays a wet t-shirt contest host in the film - and Jerry O'Connell, who plays the sleazy backer of said contest as well as owner of Wild Wild Girls, both appear on the site. The point? Piranha 3D wants you to know that this is no PG-13, watered down experience. They're going full on with the trashy sleaze.
Volley number two came in the form of an aborted screening of eight minutes of footage at the San Diego Comic-Con. Headlines shouted "Too Hot For San Diego!" and "Banned by Comic-Con!" when the screening was yanked from the schedule and producers began to crow that they were too hardcore and too extreme for the big event. Again, the point was to claim rebellious, outsider status. Not true, said the Con organizers who have clearly stated rules about what sorts of content can and can't be shown in the big halls since they are a family friendly, unrated event. There was no chance that this footage could EVER have been shown and the producers knew that when they submitted it. Knowing that was the entire point of submitting it, I'd say, purely so that they could crow about how "extreme" the picture is.
Up next? Star Kelly Brook on the cover of Playboy. Brook is not an ugly woman and it is worth noting that this is very definitely NOT one of those chaste, cover-up pictorials that the mag runs from time to time just to get some name recognition. Not that I've looked, or anything. It is also worth noting that this is the sort of thing that must be arranged WAY in advance, so far in advance that I seriously wonder whether the appearance was something included in her Piranha contract.
And cementing the outsider status that they so clearly want to adopt? Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis has just served Dimension Films and star Jerry O'Connell with papers threatening legal action should they mention his name or his business at all while promoting the film. This, people, is marketing gold. Francis is arguably one of the highest profile sleaze hounds on the face of the planet today and if an association with Piranha 3D is considered too sleazy even for him, well...
A campaign of this type, this far reaching and this clearly calculated to prey on teenage hormones is the sort of thing that I normally find quite irritating. Even in the days when I was flooded with said hormones this sort of manipulation made me angry. But in this case, for this film, I just kind of chuckle and enjoy it. Why? Well, again, Kelly Brook is not an ugly woman. But also, while the marketers may be cynical bastards, the people who made the film don't seem to be at all. Hell, they're having a blast. I mean, how can you possibly be irritated with a film as trashy as this that enlists most of its stars to create a video shilling for Oscar consideration? Really, all I want to know at this point is how they got Elizabeth Shue to agree to star.