John Gulager’s “Piranha 3DD” is the sequel to the 2010 comedy-horror hit “Piranha 3D,” which was a loose remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 cult classic “Piranha,” which was a cheap knock-off of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” which was based on the novel of the same name by Peter Benchley. All of these pieces of work have one thing in common, one thing best summed up by a line of dialogue desperately screeched by one terrified teenage victim of many in “Piranha 3DD:” “There’s something in the water!”
And this something, as I’m sure you can decipher from the title, is a school of flesh-eating, prehistoric piranhas, as well as a few too many pairs of oversized lady-jugs. While in the first film the computer-generated monsters of the sea were the scourge of Lake Victoria and its scantily-clad inhabitants, this time they’re paying an unexpected visit to a water park: Big Wet Water Park, to be exact, which has just received its grand opening in Arizona.
Owner of 51% of the Big Wet is Chet (David Koechner, “Anchorman”), a perverse, money-grubbing buffoon (Koechner used the film’s director for inspiration, I believe) who builds an Adult Pool section on the site, which of course provides much of the film’s gratuitous boobies and buns action. Owner of the other 49% is Chet’s stepdaughter, Maddy (Danielle Panabaker, “The Ward”), who rolls her eyes at her stepfather's lurid, cheap methods of running the park (much like the director’s lurid, cheap methods of making this film).
Maddy and her friends (that’s Matt Bush’s awkward co-worker Barry and Chris Zylka’s douchebag cop Kyle, not that we get to know them very well) begin to suspect something fishy is going on in the water: could the killer fish from Lake Victoria really be lurking nearby? Soon enough, their suspicions are fully confirmed: carnage ensues at the water park, as an unstoppable swarm of blood-thirsty piranhas work their way through the Big Wet’s plumbing system into the various pools of the site, leaving many unhappy swimmers leaving the park less than fully intact.
I would call “Piranha 3DD” bottom-of-the-barrel junk, but I don’t believe calling it such a name would really do it justice. You see, “Piranha 3DD” is a film so death-defyingly dreadful and earth-shatteringly irksome that it seems it has used its ferocious fangs to chomp its way through the barrel’s wooden base (piranhas can do that, y’know), slithered underneath the barrel and has speedily swam its way down to the murky, rarely explored depths of the deep blue sea - with any luck, it will stay there, and never bother us again.
I liked 2010’s “Piranha 3D;” it was a very enjoyable, very schlocky B-movie held up high by Alexandre Aja’s skillful direction, a mostly fine cast, a proper sense of fun and a gruesome grotesquery so gnarly that the film actually became rather endearing. “Piranha 3DD” has none of these qualities, aside from the fact that it is a schlocky B-movie: John Gulager’s direction is stupendously sloppy, much of the acting is as watery as the piranhas’ natural habitat, any sense of fun the film had the potential for is drowned in the unrelenting tedium of it all, and the frequent sequences depicting gory shenanigans are disappointingly desperate to shock and appall (the inevitable instance of penile dismemberment is self-inflicted this time, and horrendously hindered by the god-awful acting of the unfortunate self-amputee).
Worse still is the film’s attitude towards the female sex, which is stunningly even more lurid and perverse than that of the first “Piranha" - the film is fitted with the sexual politics of a certain robe-wearing owner of a certain Playboy Mansion. Almost every scene in “Piranha 3DD" is littered with extreme close-ups of surgically enhanced knockers bouncing up and down, left and right, drenched in pool water and assorted bodily fluids, sometimes covered up by a brassier, most of the time baring all, and filmed quite often in “Matrix"-style bullet-time. I guess the eye-straining 3D helps to eradicate this X-rated onslaught of shameless bare-chestedness: all boobs contained therein are reduced to blurry blobs of fluctuating flesh darkened by the blackened lenses of your plastic spectacles. But I won’t dwell on the booby problem too much: after all, what the heck do you expect from an exploitation flick whose title is inspired by a bra size?
I think the worst offense committed by “Piranha 3DD”, or rather by Gulager, is the film’s complete and utter lack of self-awareness concerning its own identity. Gulager, whose past filmography consists of 2005 monster movie “Feast” and its two straight-to-DVD sequels, doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue as to what on Earth the movie he is directing is supposed to be. He explores two options: he could either be directing a tongue-in-cheek splatter-fest played straight, a la “Piranha 3D” (the grisly death scenes and pathetic attempts at suspense point towards this), or a goofy slapstick comedy in the vain of the “Scary Movie” franchise (The Hoff’s music-accompanied “Baywatch” run and the bouncing bazookas filmed in slow-motion swing towards this). Unable to make up his tiny little mind, Gulager optimistically decides to take turns with both, and the result is a film that is, suffice to say, a tonally confused disaster zone.
Against my better judgement, I’m going to award “Piranha 3DD” with a rating of two marks out of ten, although I am hesitant to be so generous. Let me break it down for you, dear reader: the first mark this horrible filth is receiving from me is for “David” and the other, more deserved mark, is for “Hasselhoff.” All else contained within “Piranha 3DD” is worthless, cheap, lazy, sleazy, stupid, unfunny, puzzling, infuriating, exasperating and, most scandalously of all, quite boring (even with all the boobs on display). I must say, I look forward to the time when I can see the film’s DVD cover dumped in the bargain bin of my local Blockbuster, right where it belongs and where it will hopefully never leave.
2/10
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