Here I go. Wading bravely into the Harleyquin’s pool of crud.
Alexandre Aja’s 2010 remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 b-movie hoot, Piranha, didn’t exactly set the world alight.
Sure, it was absolutely chock-a-block with boobs, buckets of blood and severed penises. It was mindless fun but it wasn’t a great film. The CGI was poor and the 3D was woeful and those are just some of the complaints.
However, it must have made some bucks somewhere as it has spawned a sequel and after questions were raised as to whether or not it would ever see the light of day in cinemas, it has finally arrived.
Is it any good?
Well, if boobs, buckets of blood and severed penises are the mark of quality in your horror films, then you, my friend, are in for a treat. This has all of that and some full frontal nudity to boot.
Shame it’s not even as good as Aja’s film.
It has been a year since the events at Lake Victoria that saw the huge school of prehistoric piranha decimate a town full of kids enjoying celebrating Spring Break. Now, Lake Victoria is nothing more than a dead, lifeless wasteland, ruled by the piranha.
However, a little ways away is The Big Wet Splash Park.
That’s right. The Big Wet. Only the first of many “wet” jokes, I can assure you. The Big Wet is owned by marine biology student Maddy and her step-father, Chet, an “entrepeneur” who wishes to turn the family park into…you ready? A stripper filled nudey pool park. Everywhere you look, there are massive, sopping jugs and shaven female genitalia. Sometimes in slow motion, but always oily or wet. In the main pool, at the ladder, is the “cooch cam”. A voyeurs dream. You get the picture?
Anyway, the pesky dino-fish have returned and found their way into the pipes of The Big Wet and they are hungry. So Maddy and her friends Barry (The Big Wet’s litter collector) and Kyle (douchebag police officer) must join forces to save the park and the swimmers within.
Flimsy, eh?
Truth be told, Piranha 3DD sucks. It is filled to the gunnels with unlikable characters and bags of puerility for puerility’s sake. Case in point, a fat dude who sticks his knob in the parks water jets and later has to have a piranha forceably removed from his rectum. Why? Who knows? Who gives a toss.
The cast is filled with recognisable faces though few give anything close to believable performances. Danielle Panabaker (Friday The 13th 2009) and Katrina Bowden (Tucker & Dale vs Evil) look completely bewildered throughout. David Koechner (Final Destination 5, Anchorman) is perfect for Chet but the script leaves him very little to do and he is wasted in it.
Christopher Lloyd and Ving Rhames return to their roles from Aja’s film and bring some much needed brevity and charm to proceedings, though it seems like a desperate move as their roles are also poorly written and weak.
Oddly, it’s the inclusion of David Hasselhoff that makes for many of Piranha 3DD‘s finest moments. The Hoff sends himself up wonderfully and it seems that the best lines (and I use that loosely) have been reserved for him.
Frankly, I didn’t expect THAT much from Piranha 3DD but I had expected more of director John Gulager. His Feast films were great, gory fun and I had hoped for WAY more from writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton. These guys are responsible for penning the aforementioned Feast and The Collector, not to mention Saw series entries 4, 5 and 6, for Christ’s sake.
However, their script here must’ve been written in twenty minutes. It’s dreadful, the jokes aren’t funny and the set pieces are appalling.
The gore? Well, naturally, there’s a lot of blood. It’s just not executed with anywhere near the same skill or flair as in the first film. The consistent use of CGI blood made me want to jam the legs of my 3D specs into my eyes. The visual effects are still terrible. The piranha are reduced to nothing more than cartoony, toothed monsters while the 3D is pointless, reserved for some more puke and leaping fish.
So when all is said and done, Piranha 3DD is a tasteless and poorly realised waste of time. That said, there ARE a lot of naked ladies, so if that’s your thing, you will no doubt love this, provided you don’t have something better to do and let’s face it, you probably do.
