PIRANHA 3DD

Piranha 3DD (18)
Director:​ John Gulager
Screenplay: Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton
Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Ving Rhames,David Hasselhoff

Terror Lurks Where You Least Expect It

I was quite looking forward to this. Not because I was expecting to see a great movie. But because I was hoping to be entertained.

Boy was I disappointed.



The first movie wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  It was unashamedly over-the-top.  Lots of loud dance music, lots of flesh and a level of gore that still remains unparallelled.



Those elements, although appealing to many, do not make an entertaining movie on their own though. Alex Aja knew that. Amongst all the carnage and Kelly Brook’s tits, the French director ensured that the film was stylistically and structurally sound.



John Gulager (and Dunstan and Melton) on the other hand clearly failed to understand this. You might have thought that the guy who directed Feast – a gory but fun low budget affair – would be perfectly matched for the sequel. Think again.



The set-up is simple and not really worth going into too much detail but suffice to say a load of piranha invade a water park. There really isn’t much more that's worth telling you, plot wise. The film seems to meander around so much that in the end, you just don't care what's going on.

Even Panabaker in short shorts can’t rescue this.



Somehow Gulager has created a mess. A massive, unfunny, dull mess.

A film devoid of energy and emotion and fun.  Technically it suffers too. The CGI is poor and the action sequences are dreary. Where the first one didn’t take itself too seriously, this film tries so hard to be funny that it forgets that it is primarily supposed to be a horror movie. The jokes fall flat at every turn. It almost feels like an addition to the Scary Movie franchise. Yet it’s not as funny. That’s how bad it is.



Hasselhoff, Koechner and Rhames try in vain to up the entertainment value but their lines are so poorly written and they are so misused by the director that they all end up becoming part of the problem.  The film quickly becomes a parody of itself. Albeit one with no personality or charisma.

I could go on and on listing the flaws of this dud but I’d prefer to write more extensively about films that are deserving of my attention. And yours.

A waste of 83 minutes of my life

Thanks Gulager.