Piranha 3DD: Review

It has been a while, but I’m back with a new review! My apologies for the delay, I have been busy preparing for the launch of my “What Did I just Watch” podcast with Freq Media Entertainment, and still working on my master’s degree. Despite all that, I found some time this weekend to watch “Piranha 3DD”. You already know that I have a special affinity for B-Horror and Grindhouse movies, so you would think this movie would be right up my alley, right? Let’s just say it didn’t do what I think it was trying to do.

I understand that it was trying to be tongue in cheek bad, but there is so bad that it’s good [see also Hatchet or The Toxic Avenger], and then there is just bad [see also Dylan Dog]. This movie belongs in the latter group. First off, I cannot remember any of the characters’ names. If I don’t care enough about the characters to remember their names, I certainly am not going to care what happens to them. When fatalities occur, my reaction was, “meh”, and “who cares?” (in my best Joy Behar voice).

This movie also insults the intelligence of the audience. O.K. I understand that those of us that want to watch gory creature features are regarded as having lower standards than those who watch high brow independent foreign films, but the two are not mutually exclusive (I enjoy watching both types of movies. Take that Hollywood!).  A prime example of this happens when two of the lead characters go to visit the scientist from Piranha 2 and discover that the piranha can chew through steel. What do our protagonists do next? They go to the lake and one of them jumps in to check the grate.  First, why are you jumping into piranha-infested water? Second, whether the grate is in tact or not does not matter since we already established that the piranha could chew through metal.

The only good things about this movie is that it did not shy away from being gory, it had Gary Busey and Christopher Lloyd in it (Yeah David Hasselhoff was in it too, but much like the whole Chuck Norris thing I never got what the big deal about him), and the special effects and 3D were pretty good except for the few time when you could clearly see that they were using rubber fish, but then I kind of like stuff like that. One of my favorite movies is Basket Case, and they used a foam latex puppet filmed in stop motion at times as the monster in that. As a matter of fact forget Piranha 3DD even exists and just watch Basket Case.