where: CENTURY 14 VALLEJO in Vallejo, CA
when: Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
show: 3:15 p.m.
costs: $10.75 Ticket + $5.25 small Popcorn w/ Butter + $4.00 small Diet/Zero ( w/ Barq's & Cherry flavors ) Coke + $6.60 McDonald's # 3 Double Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese Meal ( w/ my Punch blend of Minute Maid Light Lemonade, Minute Maid Strawberry Passion and Hi-C Orange Lava Burst ) = $26.60
auditorium: 7, with the 3-D screen
seat: 5th row, 9th column
synopsis: It's spring break time at Lake Victoria where high school and college kids go for some serious sun and fun! But a prehistoric underwater menace has just been unleashed on the unsuspecting revelers.
noteworthy scenes: 1.) Whirlpool; 2.) Spring break; 3.) Sand rat, Jake ( Steven R. McQueen ); 4.) Jake's bedroom; 5.) Body; 6.) Cliff diver; 7.) "$20.00 deception surcharge"; 8.) Skinny dippers; 9.) Subterranean lake; 10.) Scuba divers; 11.) Eggs; 12.) Feeding frenzy; 13.) "Gratitude is the right attitude"; 14.) Tequila time; 15.) Fossil; 16.) Para-glider; 17.) "My mom's the sheriff"; 18.) Wet Tee-Shirt contest; 19.) Emergency; 20.) Snagged propeller; 21.) Butt; 22.) Snapped cable; 23.) Motor boat; 24.) Caught hair; 25.) The glass bottom; 26.) "They took my penis"; 27.) Saline breast implants and the penis; 28.) Assorted victims; 29.) The rope to safety; 30.) Explosion; 31.) The bad news; and 32.) Bonus scene after the Ending Credits.
audience reaction: The audience seemed to like this Horror Comedy movie.
recommendation: This is a good enough horror movie. But I don't think that it will be the main reason why guys will go see this 3-D movie. Heh, heh, heh ....
spoiler alert! Somebody who flunked in College Biology probably came up with the idea for this horror movie.
First of all, if the piranhas lived in a subterranean lake for millions of years then, in the complete absence of light, they would all be without pigmentation and would also be blind. And they would have to rely mainly on their senses of smell, touch and hearing. Second, they cannot live for long in such an environment because they would be out of food soon enough. In the case of cannibalism, the strong prey on the young, the old, the weak, the sick, the dying and the dead. Eventually, the adults would have nothing left to cannibalize other than their eggs. But the adult piranhas would not be able to lay eggs forever and would get old and die. Then, the last batches of eggs that they would lay would eventually spawn, but not at the same time. So, the baby piranhas would cannibalize the eggs that have not spawned yet. And since the baby piranhas would still be too young to reproduce, they would all die-out of starvation. End of story.
Piranhas, although successful predators and scavengers, are limited to a geographical area in tropical South America because they are extremely sensitive to changes in temperature. In this movie, their subterranean environment is supposedly 30 degrees colder than that of Lake Victoria, itself. So, exposure to this rapid temperature change alone would have easily killed them off. Add to this the fact that their rapid ascent from the confines of their subterranean prison would have exposed them to an extreme shift in water pressure ( to which they had no built-in adaptation ) and made them succumb to the effects of decompression, the "bends", so to speak.
The badly mangled hand should not have been able to flex or extend because the ligaments and tendons would have been torn severely. There is nothing about a piranha's anatomy to suggest that it can rip a human eyeball clear out of its socket. The only way that the lone piranha could have homed-in on the little girl with a foot wound was through its sense of hearing, not its sense of smell because the water current didn't yet carry the blood scent to where it was. Also, the farther out that blood dissipates in water, the more dilute it gets. So, in a big body of water such as a lake, there is no way in the world that the piranha could have smelled the little girl's blood. An analogy to this would be this example: If you were standing at one end of a football field and downwind from another guy at the opposite end who let out a stinky fart, you would not be able to smell it at all! Why didn't the adult piranhas follow along with the little piranhas in the first place? The face of one girl whose hair was caught in the boat's propeller should not have been ripped off her head after the boat's engine started again. The wrong SFX was used for the underwater screams. Try and scream underwater to know what I mean. The girl whose body was pulled in half should have shown lots of blood and a torn torso before it happened. Derrick ( Jerry O'Connell ) should have died right away of extreme blood loss. Why did the saline breast implants remain intact? Why did a piranha regurgitate the penis; after all, "meat" is meat, right? And, to think, I thought Charlie Tuna was the only fish in the world with "good taste"! Why did all four of them dangle from the rope at the same time? I didn't know that walkie-talkies are waterproofed--or are they ...?
fyi: Steven R. McQueen is the grandson of Steve McQueen.
One of my friend's, Hector, son has a friend who put a piranha fish in the lake at Shadow Cliffs in Pleasanton, California, some years back. But, like I said, piranhas are extremely sensitive to changes in water temperature and that fish probably died of hypothermia eventually.
word of advice: You're in deep water if your feet cannot touch the bottom.
If you're standing in water up to your lips, don't fart! ( This is the Voice of Experience talking. )
tidbits: Before going to see this movie, I typed some complaint letters because a company in Illinois is billing me for something that I didn't order from them. I paid them for what I ordered from them. Then they sent me another package which I neither wanted nor ordered. When I e-mailed them about it ten months ago, they admitted to their error and promised to send me a return postage with a tracking number. But they never did. Instead, they kept sending me a monthly bill. The last straw was when they had a collection agency try to intimidate me into paying for something that I didn't order or risk damaging my excellent credit rating. So, I sent a letter to the company's credit department, its chairman, the collection agency, and the Better Business Bureau. The package remains untouched and unopened, and is just waiting for a return postage with a tracking number because I simply refuse to pay money for somebody else's mistake, irresponsibility and/or incompetence. Needless to say, after many years of doing business with said company, I told its chairman that I don't ever want to do business with them anymore! ( Maybe the chairman will offer me the conciliatory gesture of letting me be the co-chairman in charge of making coffee and getting the doughnuts--Hey! wait a minute .... That's a secretary's job. Damn! Oh, forget it. )
So, I went to Postal Annex to make copies of my complaint and to send out the letters via first class mail. When I returned to my car, which has no air conditioning, it was so hot inside the cab that I could not even hold the steering wheel for long. At one point, I had to turn left, and when the tires straightened out and caused the steering wheel to spin, the palm of my hands felt like they were being scalded by hot, boiling water! No wonder that in the old days people wore driving gloves! I decided not to go home right away. I went to the nearby theatre to see this movie so that I'd enjoy some cool comfort in an air-conditioned auditorium until the punishing heat of the sun lessened to a bearable point.
After the movie, it was still somewhat hot so I went to McDonald's for a bite to eat. Lucky for me, I found a parking spot under the shade of a nearby tree.
attention: It is getting close to the Annual Weblog Awards. Please take the time to nominate mine in the following categories: Best Entertainment, Most Humorous, Best-Kept Secret and Best New Weblogs. Just go through my entries for this year and pick out your favorite. Thank you.
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