‘Welcome to rock bottom...’
The biggest surprise when watching Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D is just how good it is. The biggest surprise when watching Piranha 3DD is just how bad it is. Director John Gulager takes everything that was good about the film that preceded it and systematically destroys it. Put simply, this film is an utter disaster…
After the events at Lake Victoria in the previous movie, the piranha return, this time at a water park – a premise that could be a lot of fun if it wasn’t executed in such an awful, obnoxious way. Ving Rhames, David Koechner and even Christopher Lloyd return from the previous film, but even they can’t save Piranha 3DD from ignominy. Of the new cast members, Danielle Panabaker does her best with what she is given (which is very little) but everyone else is uniformly bland. Unsurprisingly, a cameo from Gary Busey does little to lift the gloom but I must admit that David Hasselhoff does come out of this with some credit in what is surprisingly a pretty funny cameo appearance.
This is the kind of film in which a Piranha fish exits a woman’s vagina, attaches itself to a man’s penis and then the man hacks his penis off with a knife. It’s one in a series of deeply unpleasant moments that are neither shocking nor funny. Aja’s film was self-deprecating and knowing, even satirical in places, this sequel is none of those things. This is much closer to something like Sharknado or some other nonsense. Now, let’s never speak of it again.
