Piranha - ***

Boobs, blood, and more boobs. Not usually the best combination, but somehow Alexandre Aja fits it all together for some outstanding entertainment in the new Piranha film. It's easily one of the thinnest plots ever conceived: seismic activity ruptures the floor of a lake near the shore of a small town during Spring Break, and thousands of highly evolved piranha come out to feed. Finally a film that knows not only to be dumb, but also how to be dumb. It has no pretensions about being great, or even having any kind of plot resolution, but instead it's eight minutes of set-up, probably two of which feature a fantastically whacked-out Christopher Lloyd, and then eighty minutes of climax. And it's refreshing to see a retro drive-in style horror movie made with sincerity, without any purposefully silly Grindhouse-like winks at the audience. It's exactly what it needs to be. The boobs are big, the CGI is terrible, the blood flows by the gallon, and it's all genuinely fun. Apparently that's not an easy task, because I don't think I've seen anyone actually pull it off since Aja did it with The Hills Have Eyes a few years ago.