Ving Rhames is pictured in an in-your-face scene from the new horror movie Piranha 3D. (Gene Page/Dimension Films/Alliance Films)

This weekend brings the release of Piranha 3-D. Expect plenty of ravenous, razor-jawed fish lunging out of the big screen and into your popcorn — not to mention star Ving Rhames comin’ at ya with a motorboat propeller (see above).

Eight months after the premiere of Avatar, and Hollywood is still using 3-D mostly for cheap thrills.

Here we are, eight months after the premiere of Avatar and the opening of the 3-D floodgates, and Hollywood is still using the technology mostly for cheap thrills.

That could change in the coming year, however, as filmmakers of a more artistic bent bring us their 3-D efforts. At next month’s Toronto International Film Festival, German magus Werner Herzog will unveil a new documentary shot using a stereoscopic process. And the revered Martin Scorsese has begun production on his first 3-D film, Hugo Cabret, which is pegged for a 2011 release.

Filmgoers have been waiting for a movie since Avatar to justify paying a higher ticket price and donning those silly polarized shades. The 3-D offerings that have followed in the wake of James Cameron’s box-office behemoth have been, at best, redundant (Toy Story 3, Step Up 3D) and, at worst, unwatchable (Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender). They’ve inspired a backlash led by critic Roger Ebert, who wrote an article in May for Newsweek called Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too).

James Cameron's sci-fi film Avatar was a game-changer in its use of 3-D technology. (Twentieth Century Fox)

Ebert and others protest Hollywood’s shameless piggybacking on Avatar’s success by releasing every subsequent blockbuster in 3-D. The craze irks both exhibitors, who must outfit their theatres with the necessary digital projection equipment, and audience members, who are expected to fork out extra bucks for the experience.

The filmmakers can lose out, too – artistically, at any rate. Clash, Airbender and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland were all subjected to a 3-D shellacking in post-production – and shellac is what the process can look like if it’s applied to a conventionally shot picture. In creating a stereoscopic image, 3-D projectors reduce the amount of light thrown on the screen, which can lead to murky visuals. (In his review of Airbender, Ebert described it as “look[ing] like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.”)

Even when the films are shot in crisp 3-D, there’s a sense directors aren’t sure what to do with it. The fallback, so to speak, is to shove objects in our face. Only a few have shown any real imagination. Story-wise, Avatar may be noble-savage tripe, but it did a brilliant job of plunging us deep into the gleaming rainforests of the fictional Pandora. Henry Selick’s creepy Coraline used 3-D with panache, giving its stop-motion animation an eerily lifelike quality. The cartoon Despicable Me had more fun with the gimmick than most movies, taking us on a stomach-flipping roller-coaster ride and playfully extending the “distance” in front of the screen.

Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, promises a more subtle use of 3-D. Shooting the ancient pictographs in France’s Chauvet caves, his aim is to give us a tactile sense of the contours and textures of the paintings on the cave walls.

Scorsese reportedly also wants to explore the atmospheric possibilities of 3-D in Hugo Cabret. The film, which will star Jude Law and Sacha Baron Cohen, is based on Brian Selznick’s baroque children’s book about a boy who lives inside the walls of a Paris train station. According to Scorsese’s long-time editor, Thelma Shoonmaker, the director/film historian has been seeking inspiration from 3-D classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder(1954).

The current trend could be tracing the same arc that 3-D took in the early ’50s, where it began as a cheap scare tactic in B-movies like Bwana Devil, House of Wax and Creature From the Black Lagoon. They were followed by prestige pictures that attempted to employ the effect more artfully. In the MGM musical Kiss Me Kate, leggy hoofer Ann Miller seemed to dance right into the audience’s lap, and in Dial M for Murder, Grace Kelly flung an imploring arm at viewers as she struggled with a would-be killer. Everyone from the great western director Raoul Walsh to the comedy team of Martin and Lewis dabbled in three dimensions. But by 1954, the craze was over, killed by a combination of factors – not least, that the process required two 35 mm projectors running precisely in sync or the effect would fail, leaving the viewer with a splitting headache.

There are those who believe that this time, 3-D is here to stay. And they aren’t just Hollywood execs. Canadian animator Munro Ferguson, whose 3-D short Falling in Love Again won a 2004 Genie Award, says every new film technology has a novelty phase and that’s what we’re witnessing now. “It takes a while for people to actually take it seriously as a mode of expression.”

He claims 3-D is good for more than just making us flinch. “I really like the intimacy that 3-D has. The fact that the image isn’t far away on a screen, it can actually come into your space, makes it a very visceral experience for the audience, and there’s some kind of emotional power that can come with that.”

Based at the National Film Board, Ferguson works with a new 3-D animation technique called SANDDE (Stereoscopic Animation Drawing Device), which allows artists to draw in three dimensions. It’s a way of bringing hand-drawn cartooning to 3-D as an alternative to the cold calculations of computer animation.

Coraline has been one of few standout films of the new 3-D craze. (Focus Features Films)

“I think audiences feel a need for a more human connection,” he says, “and so they tend to be delighted when they find that in a 3-D movie – a place where they’re least expecting to find it.”

Our expectations have diminished with each successive 3-D release. While the new digital technology is vastly superior to the 1950s version, in some respects it's just the same old thing. There are times when its illusion of depth can be entrancing – I still recall a breathtaking shot of a receding coastline in Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf. But if it's meant to immerse us more fully in a film's world, it often fails. The added dimension can often seem like a sequence of flat planes, so that you feel like you're inside an enormous pop-up book.

Filmmakers need to pause and think about when and where to best use 3-D. Herzog and Scorsese have clearly done that, but Hollywood can’t wait. Still dazzled by Avatar’s record-breaking profits, they’re poised to deluge the multiplexes with even more 3-D releases in the coming months. The superhero blockbusters will go three-dimensional with The Green Hornet, Captain America and Thor, as will the Saw torture-porn franchise. And let’s not forget Paramount’s 3-D Justin Bieber biopic, to be unleashed on the tween hordes in early 2011. Smaller filmmakers have jumped on the bandwagon, too – including the CBC, which in September will air a 3-D documentary on Queen Elizabeth II’s recent visit to Canada.

With so many films using the technology, will 3-D lose the awe factor that makes it an attraction? Not if artists like Herzog are experimenting with it, Ferguson says.

“As you get people who are more inclined to find what can be said artistically with 3-D, you’re going to have surprisingly wonderful audience experiences,” he predicts. But that doesn’t mean we’ll be free of things like Piranha 3-D. “As long as people still make bad movies, there’ll be bad 3-D movies.”

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.