Movie Review: Piranha 3DD

Having its origins from the 1975 Spielberg movie Jaws, its ripoff 1978’s Piranha, the James Cameron sequel Piranha 2: The Spawning and the 2010 reboot, this film is a sequel of a reboot of a remake of a classic. Piranha 3DD is in 3D, but what really jumps at the audience is its dearth of intellect. When the trailer says Double the Ds, it doesn’t mean guilty pleasure – it means Dull and Dreadful.

2010’s Piranha 3D had two things to offer – gratuitous display of scantily clad women and over the top intentionally funny thrills, so how hard is it to ramp up the nudity and humor? Leave that to the magnificent  screenwriting team of Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who hold the honor of writing the Saw sequels, and Joel Soison who has brought us such gems as Mimic 2, The Prophecy: Forsaken and Children of the Corn: Genesis. The trio came up with a plot that would shame even porn filmmakers – in Arizona a dead cow floating in a lake farts out bunch of prehistoric Piranhas who make their way to a nude water park full of strippers owned by a sleazy stepfather (David Koechner). To think that this premise was the collective creative input of three writers and three editors boggles the mind.

There are a bunch of the stock horny shrill spectacularly stupid teenagers in the form of Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush and Katrina Bowden, and a collection of horribly acting cult favorites including Ving Rhames and Gary Busey in bit roles. We’re treated to scenes like a Piranha getting stuck in the anus of a fat man, the removal of which results in 3D views of the man’s feces; a woman who is attacked by Piranhas in a van while having sex and whose boyfriend is also unable to escape because he was handcuffed; and another scenario which results in a girl saying ‘Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina’. There is also a ‘crotch cam’ in the swimming pool to click pictures when women climb the ladder out. Classy. Oh and there’s David Hasselholf who plays a parody of his character from Baywatch, and has a silly elated expression on his face as if he can’t thank the producers enough for promising him a paycheck.  

While blood, nudity and horror-comedy can be goofy fun, Piranha 3DD is neither fun nor entertaining – it’s a disdainful cash grab by greedy grimy hands of people who aren’t much different from the owner of the naked water park. If your taste in movies includes ones where a man’s decapitated head lands between a pair of bloodied woman’s breasts and jiggles for ten whole seconds, then this is just the movie for you.

(First published in MiD Day)