Piranha 3DD (2012)

PIRANHA 3D was one of my favourite films of 2010, a riotous, glorious mix of the elements that made 70s and 80s exploitation cinema great, delivered with just enough of a twinkle in the eye that all the daft gore-soaked proceedings ended up being one of the most enjoyable efforts of the year. Movie sequels, and in particular horror movie sequels have a habit of failing to meet up to their predecessors, and while I really should have learned my lesson by now I was still looking forward to seeing the follow-up, which has somehow managed to get a UK cinema release. The only thing I can say about it that isn’t entirely damning is that at least it lives down to the ‘bad sequel’ tradition.

PIRANHA 3DD is terrible, absolutely terrible. In fact I might go as far as to say that this is the worst film I have ever seen at the cinema. I may have seen more execrable horror movie product on DVD, but never on a big screen have I seen such a cavalcade of failure on every possible level. I’m not in favour of film censorship but there are some films people should never see, and this is one of them. 

The film begins with a recap of the first followed by shots of the grim, depressing, deserted place the first film’s Lake Victoria has now become. For a split second the viewer is conned into thinking this film is going to develop along interesting and bleak lines, and then suddenly we’re on a very cheap looking set with Gary Busey wading through some water looking for a cow that he finds semi-submerged and dead. The cow explodes and suddenly we’re at ‘The Big Wet’ (or something) an adult-themed water park that’s due to open in three days.
       With all the ham-fistedness of Garth Marenghi on a bad day we are then subjected to a series of deaths and sex scenes that are handled with such appalling incompetence and extreme poor taste that by the time some poor young chap was trying to cut his own penis off after having sex with a girl who somehow had a piranha inside her, the whole enterprise was starting to feel rather shameful. This is nothing, however, compared to the terrible, terrible climax, where the evil villain who owns the water park ends up having his severed head bouncing between a pair of breasts in a scene that does not do the reputation of our beloved genre any good at all.
       PIRANHA 3DD does not have one single redeeming feature. The 3D is terrible and makes a mess of trying to reproduce gags from the first film. Even Christopher Lloyd rambling on about ‘The Laughing Diarrhoea Baby’ that’s managed to get more hits on YouTube than him can’t redeem it. It is badly written, shot, edited and acted, and just when you think things can’t get any worse David Hasselhoff turns up with his Casio keyboard and starts singing. Seriously. The film runs a scant 83 minutes but the end titles go on for ages, include a mass of out-takes and continue to embarrass Mr Hasselhoff and run his career into the ground even more than the poor chap has managed to do to himself already. It’s a rare day when I feel stupid for having watched a film. PIRANHA 3DD is that film. The only good thing I can say about it is that now I can watch absolutely any other film in the universe and it’s going to look like a masterpiece next to this.