Nato – Piranha 3D
I love Piranha 3D. I love it so, so much. There’s no way a movie this silly and bloody should be as good as it is, yet somewhere throughout Richard Dreyfuss getting torn to shreds in an underwater piranha cyclone or Eli Roth’s head getting smashed to bits by a boat, director Alexandre Aja wins hardcore horror audiences over by going above and beyond the gory call of duty.
Assembling a cast including Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Jerry O’Connell, Paul Scheer, Kelly Brook, Adam Scott, and a bunch of other recognizable faces, Aja pretty much hits on every fanboy’s favorite stars. I think the only actor that could have bolstered this cast’s ridiculousness even more would have been the man, the myth, the legend – Danny Trejo. But with what we’re given, Aja still puts together a splatterific masterpiece that colors Lake Victoria completely red, exploiting each situation for possible carnage, nudity, or humor.
Roger Corman’s Piranha may be classic grindhouse goodness, but Aja’s film is in a completely awesome league of it’s own.
Remy – The Abyss
See, I switched it up again. Just because we said creatures from the deep, doesn’t mean they all want to kill or maim you. In this case, the creatures in The Abyss are not evil at all, but rather sentient and intelligent, and though the ending left us with way more questions than answers, we can all admit that The Abyss and the creatures in The Abyss forever changed filmmaking.
Kudos to James Cameron for introducing us all to liquid CG in a way that made us fall in love with it, as well. Little did we know at the time CG would go onto ruin movies as we know them, but at the time, these creatures dropped our collective jaws when we saw them, and that’s why they found a spot on our list.
