Twice the Teeth. Twice the Terror.
Rating: 5/10
Running Time: 83 minutes
US Certificate: R UK Certificate: 18
How do you review a film like Piranha 3DD? The main aim of this god awful shockfest is to be a god awful shockfest and to this end it has succeeded. So, that’s 10/10 for accomplishing an aim, 2/10 for the quality of the film equalling an average rating of 6/10. But in the end, I think if I rated this any higher than 5/10, it would be a disservice to directors who actually try to make real films.
John Gulager’s (director of the Feast series of horror movies – surely, you know the ones…) film – about a school of pre-historic piranhas terorizing a waterpark – is pretty entertaining to watch. If anything, the first half is a little too slow in it’s attempt to set up the paperthin characters with glorious overacting, shoddy dialogue and piranhas that seem to be very inefficient at killing but once all hell breaks loose, the wonderful over-the-top carnage is very satisfying.
The best lines are kept for Ving Rhames – reprising his role from Piranha but without any legs and uncredited – and The Hoff’s scene’s are quite funny but overdone a bit (anyway, wasn’t the height of Hoff nostalgia a few years back now?) and Christopher Lloyd doesn’t do himself any harm with his excellent cameo appearance. Importantly, the tongue-in-cheek is obviously there throughout so there’s never any danger of it taking itself too seriously.
I suppose I have to mention the ‘bad’ things about the movie: the acting is very poor, gratuitous violence and nudity is served up for very little reason in many parts, the plot is signposted a mile off, some jokes are a little too crass to be funny and this doesn’t really add anything to the first one. Unnervingly the end sets up a very possible threequel which is very likely to be too much of a good/bad thing.
It's Got: One line to sum up the spirit of the whole film - "Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina."
It Needs: To be watched with the right frame of mind, to be more selective with some jokes
Summary
If you’re a fan of so-bad-it’s-good then this will be right up your street. It’s enjoyable naffness that’s to be taken with an ocean’s worth of salt.