After having a “girls night” with my sister wherein we sat through a 3D movie that involved pre-historic fish eating hoards of spring breakers, we left the theater with a faint sense of nausea, likely due to the combination of too much popcorn and spending eighty-nine minutes watching people get eaten by fish, and one burning question: What happened to Paul Scheer’s character?
If you haven’t seen the movie, the mystery surrounding Andrew Cunningham, the soft-core-porn photographer-slash-boat-driver is not a spoiler as we really don’t know what happened to him, but with that said, if you don’t want to be spoiled on the complexities of the plot of this stellar cinematic masterpiece, read no further.
If you did rush to the theater to see Piranha 3D, you may have recognized Scheer from VH1’s Best Week Ever, MTV’s Human Giant or more recently, FX’s comedy series The League. In Piranha 3D, he played Jerry O’Connell’s characters’ sidekick, Andrew. The last we see of Andrew, he’s on the boat with some of the other characters. While some of them were shown being cast overboard and eaten, the others managed to escape such an undignified death. Andrew wasn’t among either lot. Given that every other named character in the film was given some kind of closure, it seemed odd to me that Scheer’s character arc was never properly concluded.
The only other possibility, other than that his character was killed during one of the parts I missed because my hands were over my eyes, was that he was Judy-Winslowed (Family Matters reference!) One minute he was there, the next minute he was gone and no one seemed to notice. When I got home, I checked his website and sure enough, Andrew’s conclusion was left on the cutting room floor.
Scheer appeases his fans on his website by offering a number of possible conclusions for Andrew’s story, the first of which is the following:
OPTION #1: Andrew is a Piranha.Yup. He orchestrated this entire event. Many years ago his piranha DNA was fused with a human, he took human shape in hopes of one day coming back to Lake Victoria to unleash his pre-historic pals on an unsuspecting populace and once again reign as king of the water!
In all likelihood, Andrew’s final scene was cut out due to budget issues. As a movie-nit-picker, I’m glad I won’t be losing any sleep wondering if I somehow missed Scheer’s character’s ending. Instead, I can sleep at night with visions of half-eaten people flailing about in a lake running through my mind and hope that we’ll get to see Scheer’s death or escape scene in the Deleted Scenes feature on the DVD.
