New Release Review : Piranha 3DD

NOW IN LIMITED THEATERS & ON DEMAND!

Before we begin here, just want to reiterate that I'm a huge fan of 2010's Piranha 3D, which I found to be one of the funnest horror movies in recent years.  It's essentially the film every Syfy Original Picture wishes it was; gory as all hell, packed with laughs and simply put, fun as can be. 

DISCLAIMER : What you just read is pretty much the only positive thing you're going to read in this whole review.  And it's not even about the movie in question.  Mhm.  So I'll keep it brief, since I prefer to go on about things I love rather than rag on things I don't.  Most times, at least.  Actually it's kind of a new thing for me, to be honest.  Something about keeping negativity and hatred at bay.  I don't know, my therapist told me to give it a shot.

So.  Piranha 3DD.  When it comes to a movie such as this, I'm willing to let a lot of shit slide, stuff that I expect from other more serious horror flicks like character development and a solid story.  From a film with the word Piranha in the title, all I'm ever really looking for is one thing, and it begins with an F and ends with an N.  Be it Mega Piranha, Piranha 2 : The Spawning or Piranhaconda (It's real ... look it up), all I'm hoping for is FUN.  Simple enough, right?

Based on the trailers, it seemed as if this one was destined to be an absolute blast, just like its predecessor was.  Gary Busey biting off Piranha heads, David Hasselhoff playing David Hasselhoff, Ving Rhames with shotguns for legs, piranha swimming into vaginas, biting off dicks and feasting on hot naked chicks ... it seemed like Piranha 3DD had it all figured out.  It seemed as if there was no way the end result was not going to be a good gory blast of cheesy water park fun, a hybrid of Jaws 3D and Alex Aja's uproarious 3D remake.  And ya know what?  I was all set to be satisfied with it even if it was only half as fun as Aja's effort.

Well guess what?  Half as fun would be giving it way too much credit.

Bottom line is, Piranha 3DD is just plain not fun.  I'm not sure how they managed to screw up a simple formula for fun so badly, but the film is quite frankly a boring repetitious mess of fake tits, lame kills, lamer attempts at humor and gore that's as fake as those aforementioned fake tits.  Piranha 3DD is inferior to Piranha 3D on absolutely every single level, replacing its hilarious and clever cameos with washed up stars who fail to deliver the laughs, its incredible practical effects with oodles of terrible CGI, its likeable characters with unlikeable characters, and all of its story and humor with eye candy that is so clearly being thrown around to distract from everything else that the whole mess comes off as being downright desperate.

What Alex Aja accomplished in the opening scene of Piranha 3D alone, by having Richard Dreyfuss reprising the role of Matt Hooper, drinking an Amity beer before fittingly meeting his end at the hands of killer fish, was quite frankly more entertaining than the entirety of Piranha 3DD.  Sorry Gulager, but David Hasselhoff making fun of the fact that he was on Baywatch ceased being funny about 10 years ago.

If there's anything positive I can say about the movie it's that Ving Rhames and his shotgun legs are pretty damn funny, with Rhames' brief performance serving as the highlight of the film for me personally.  But the screen time he gets and the action his shotgun legs get to see is so minimal that he's never given any kind of chance of bringing any real enjoyment to the proceedings.  Methinks they should've given him a bit more time to shine.  But I guess throwing more fake tits on the screen was more important than trying to make the film funny or engaging.

Being that this one has absolutely no excuse for not being at least moderately fun, I've gotta consider this film a huge failure.  There's a fine line between laugh out loud hilarious and roll your eyes stupid, and Piranha 3DD almost always forced my eyeballs to dance.  I think it all boils down to the fact that it tries way too hard in all the wrong places; too hard to be edgy, too hard to be raunchy, but never too hard to actually entertain the audience.  The blood's there, the boobs are there and the beasts are there, but none of the three are ever delivered with any kind of competency or degree of fun.

If my years of porn watching have taught me anything, it's that copious amounts of tits and ass alone do not a good movie make, which is something that John Gulager and company clearly failed to realize when they set out to make Piranha 3DD.

Now I will say that I love the fact that this movie came out On Demand the same day it was released in limited theaters, and I hope more studios start doing that.  There are so many times that movies I want to see are playing nowhere near me, and it's great in those situations for those movies to be accessible by anyone, anywhere, in their own home.  Don't want to see people wasting their money to watch this crap, but I do kinda secretly hope it does really well On Demand so we can start seeing more films given this treatment.  Nothing worse than a movie coming out that only a small handful of people can actually see!