Piranha 3DD

Just how low is the lowest common denominator?  "Piranha 3DD" (pronounced "three-double-D") is the one movie that dares to find to answer.

"Piranha 3D" probably remains the best monster movie of this current decade, being exactly what a monster movie should be:  fun, gory, silly, and full of bare boobs.   This is the movie that brought up the underwater nude lesbian sex scene, remember.  And its also the movie that brings us the sight of hundreds of idiot spring break kids getting eaten by fish with great gruesome effects.  It had a great cast, funny scenes, and just a perfect sense of unserious fun that Michael Bay wishes he could achieve.  A true return to proper 80s horror movies, unlike the CG gore crap that has devoured the entire horror world.  It even managed to use the 3D gimmick properly, making "Piranha 3D" the only horror remake to be better than the original.  So obviously there would be a sequel, and "Piranha 3DD" is that movie.  Weirdly, however, this got the most bizarrely limited release, coming out in only one hundred theaters around the country, and just one in my entire state.  So this review would have come out earlier, but sadly I couldn't see this in theaters.

Anyway, the big question:  is "Piranha 3DD" any good?  Well, right off the bat, its not as good as the first one.  This is probably going to be a short review because its really a short movie and not exactly world-changing stuff.  From the start, the cast isn't nearly as good.  Adam Scott's character is dead, Jerry O'Connell's character is dead, the only survivors to come back are Christopher Lloyd and Ving Rhames, and they only have cameos, really.  Instead its just a bunch of nameless faceless horror movie twenty-somethings who are guaranteed to get killed.  So right the cream of the acting crop is wiped out.  Gary Busey opens the movie... but gets eaten immediately (though at least he dies after biting one of the piranha's head off).  The big surprise here is David Hasselhoff, playing David Hasselhoff, and teaching the giant fish to never hassle the Hoff.  The gore effects aren't nearly as good, the entire film is terribly color corrected* to blue and orange - so that means we can't have too much blood, since blood is red.  There's too much CG gore, they don't really do anything with the piranhas that we didn't see last movie, and everything is just a lot less fun.

So realizing they made a more mediocre movie, the filmmakers inserted tits everywhere.  Finally we have a movie that lives up to its "Double-D" promise.  Its at least watchable then.

The concept here actually is pretty good.  The piranhas are back, though strangely not giant-sized like Christopher Lloyd promised at the end of the first movie.  And now there's this new water park opening with stripper lifeguards.  (I told you this movie has lots of nudity, you shouldn't have doubted me.)  Then the piranhas go to the water park and get to feast on lots of silicone implants.  Now that's the set up, unfortunately it takes the movie about an hour to get there.  Its pretty much the same as the first movie which was just Spring Break + Piranha = Fun.  But this time the movie kinda wanders around, has a few kills, but really underuses its own premise.

I mean, there are a few fun things here and there.  This one girl goes skinny dipping, and a piranha swims up her cooch.  A few scenes later her boyfriend is having sex with her, and the piranha decides to come back and clamp right onto his dick.  So what does the boyfriend to do?  Well, the obvious solution is to take a cleaving knife and cut your own dick off!  So he does that!  Disappointingly, no piranhas pop out of the girl like an Alien chestburster.  And actually, I just described the entire best scene.

As for the actual waterpark sequence, which is what everybody was looking forward to, its not nearly as inventive as you might have hoped.  They never do anything with the waterslides, the piranhas mostly attack the wavepool and the lazy river.  David Hasselhoff more or less steals the show, but only due to his own star power.  And then, right when the movie gets the most interesting:  when the piranhas inexplicably evolve to walk on land, it ends.  Like, COME ON!  Give me something!  The movie is short, to the point, and properly fun, but is it all it could have been?  No.

There's also this one horrific fat asshole character who I believe is the single most annoying character in the history of film.  I'm talking worse than Jar Jar here.  The movie introduces him as he masturbates himself using the pool filter.  Then he only continues to be just disgustingly awful.  At one point a piranha swims inside his asshole, he leaps onto some puke.  Uch.  This son of a bitch doesn't even have the dignity of getting killing immediately.

Ultimately "Piranha 3DD" is just a weaker movie all around.  I still recommend "Piranha 3D", but this one, only if you're as big of a fan of stupid B movies as I am.  And even I can't say this was all that great as a B-movie.  In any case, this is the closest thing you'll ever get to a Planet Blue review of a porn.  Sorry folks.

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* Color correction, by the way, is the scourge that will one day completely wipe out modern cinema.  Are Hollywood editors these days color blind?  Don't they realize the harm they're doing to movies?  What is wrong with natural color temperatures?  Especially in a horror movie, where you need RED!  Red for blood!  If anything, color correcting should increase the vibrancy of the color, not decrease it.  Look around your room right now, count the colors.  Go outside and enjoy the majesty of our natural beautiful environment.  Then watch any horror movie made in the last five years, and you can see how terrible this looks.