★☆☆☆☆
(2012)
Alexandre Aja’s campy B-movie spoof certainly got it’s fair share of publicity back in 2010. Surviving on a relatively respectful crowd of film nerds it passed the post limping but intact. Despite it’s knowingly tongue in cheek premise in which a freak earthquake releases a thousand prehistoric Piranha on an unsuspecting spring break destination (during spring break), the film was handled well by Aja, nodding and winking the whole way. It was the movie equivalent of a loud fat geek in a Jaws t-shirt with a nervous twitch, gleefully taking apart the tradition of teenagers in lust and spraying it with gallons of gore and laying on more sexual innuendo than Kanye West at a stag do.
John Gulager hideous sequel can’t even be bothered to take its hands out of it’s pockets to reach for the extremely low bar set by Aja; It instead rolls under it with all the grace of a drunk fat man at work Christmas party. Visions of Gulager on set with a bottle of cheap hooch, sitting in a deck chair pondering boobs and pick up lines while being fanned by some “assistants” crossed my mind more often than the film did. Then I though about cleaning my oven, sending some emails to a complete stranger declaring my new found love of pears, cutting my toenails or mixing up a dangerous cocktail of alcohol to make me forget everything. Anything to avoid the garish mess smearing it’s way across the screen. A staggering achievement really considering how little brain power needed to focus on this severed penis of a film. Note: The film does actually contain at least one severed penis.
The set up is the same as the first. It’s Gary Busey this time who gets chomped instead of Richard Dreyfuss. Christopher Lloyd is in it for a bit as a mad scientist again (because that’s what he HAS to be these days. It’s practically the law. There are Lloyd Inspectors on the set of every film he stars in with a machine which measures the amount of “crazy” in his performance. They call it the “Fux Incapacitator”. Seriously.) He explains again, to a group of cross-eyed, horny, plastic-stuffed teenagers just how dangerous these little buggers are. Then there is a bit of screaming, some slow motion DD shots set to obnoxious teenage musical sludge and then the whole damn lot of the hungry fish get into a water park/strip club where the semen content of the hot tubs is higher than the water content of the hot tubs.
The second half mind-bogglingly contains the saddest extended cameo of all time in which David Hasselhoff parodies his Baywatch fame with zero spark. As he sits in his life guard chair on the “Big Wet” Water Park’s opening day his smile is big and full of cheese but his dead eyes are sadder than a terminally ill puppy’s. It’s a sickeningly uncomfortable effort from the Hoff who looks as if he’s reading his lines while dreaming of driving a talking car, eating burgers off the floor or even remembering the time he helped unite East and West Germany by lip-synching to songs he didn’t write while wearing leather pants. After all those are all much more worthy past times.
Shot in 25 days with a budget of 20 million dollars (nearly a million a day, people!), Piranha 3DD is not so much a tongue in cheek parody, even of the original, as it is a pile of burning infected vermin. A pile of burning infected vermin symbolising everything that is wrong with the spoon fed casual cinema going mainstream, now completely unable to even find that fine line between clever and stupid, let alone see it.
Even with an added dimension. The added dimension of total balls.
