Piranha 3DD – Review

Piranha 3DD (2012) –

Directed by John Gulager. Starring Danielle Panabaker, Ving Rhames, David Hasselhoff. Christopher Lloyd, Gary Busey, Jean-Luc Bilodeau, David Koechner

The only achievement of this film, as far as I am concerned, it that it has managed to get the lowest score so far on my blog. Of course, I was never expecting to see a masterpiece from a movie with such title… But at least I was hoping for something just as self-consciously trashy, funny and splatter  as the deliciously camp B-movie first part (which itself was a remake) directed by Alexandre Aja in 2010.

There have been several trashy splatter/exploitive horrors in the past (mainly in the 80s and early 90s) which I still consider classics within their own genre (Re-Animator, Society, possibly even Tremors and to a degree the Evil Dead movies just to mention a few). Why couldn’t this have been one of them? All the ingredients seemed to have been there: an R rating (18 here in the UK), tits-galore right from the title, exploitive 3D, horrible little hungry monsters (piranha in this case), and a series of more or less famous stars willing to play along…

Unfortunately what I found was the most un-inventive, uninspired, un-funny, un-scary, dull piece of junk I have seen in a very long time… (Well, I guess that by itself is quite an achievement since I do watch quite a lot of movies). Yes, it’s boring too, despite being only 83 minutes long.

How can somebody like Christopher Lloyd, the man with a resume sporting such masterpieces like One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest and Back to the Future, could have accepted to have his name associated with such an insult to human intelligence is beyond me! Was your rent really so behind, Chris?

The film is badly conceived, badly filmed, really badly post-converted into 3D (possibly the worse conversion I’ve seen since a cheap stereoscopic comic I had when I was 10!). The story (if we can call it such) makes no sense (there’s a piranha in the swimming pool… well, get the f**k out it!). The characters (again… characters?!) all merge into one  and even the gore is way below anything one would have hoped for such a movie and most of the potentially gruesome stuff is happening off camera (I guess they didn’t have enough imagination to figure out how to make it on camera!)

For the first 30 minutes or so, you don’t really know how to take it. It seems a film aimed at 14 or 15 years old kids who are hoping to get a peek at some boobies for the first time in their lives… except that this film is actually rated 18…which kinda defeats that purpose. So in the beginning it all starts building up as a straight horror (a bad one of course, but still a horror). Only once David Hasselhoff shows up you actually begin to get a hint of the fact that this is all supposed to be taken for a laugh… If only it were remotely funny. The  “jokes”  (please notice the inverted commas) are so puerile and genuinely unfunny that it becomes almost embarrassing. Not only we are not laughing with it, but we are not even laughing at it… in fact we are just not laughing at all.

This is one of the few films where  not even the endless outtakes during the end credits can make you smile (And when I say ‘endless’ I do mean really endless.. What an indulgent and embarrassing moment!. There is nothing worse than seeing a whole bunch of actors and grown-up film-makers laughing at things which are not even remotely funny to us outside.

To be honest, I think the film doesn’t even deserve such a detailed review, so I’ll just stop here and urge you to give it a miss, even (and especially) if you love this genre.

3/10