Main cast: Danielle Panabaker (Maddy), Matt Bush (Barry), David Koechner (Chet), Katrina Bowden (Shelby), Jean-Luc Bilodeau (Josh), Chris Zylka (Kyle), Paul James Jordan (Travis), Meagan Tandy (Ashley), Ving Rhames (Deputy Fallon), David Hasselhoff (Himself), and Christopher Lloyd (Mr Goodman)
Director: John Gulager
Is there any point to Piranha 3DD? I’d think that if they want to cash in on the success of the previous movie, they’d try to outdo themselves. But this one just limps lamely to the finish line.
Set a year after Piranha 3D, this time around we have Chet, an enterprising fellow who decides to start a water park that promises full frontal female nudity and gratuitous lipstick lesbian romps at the price of an entrance fee. His stepdaughter Maddy is not amused that he is turning her mother’s legacy into this sordid thing, but she has no idea that things will get worse. Chet has been siphoning water illegally from the lake, and guess what type of monsters lurk in those waters. That’s right, more of those flesh-hunting hungry piranhas that look like they were made from rubber!
The problem with this movie is that the folks behind it seem to have expanded all their creative energy on the scene where a piranha jumps out of a woman’s vagina to bite a man’s penis while they are having sex, and there is nothing left for the rest of the movie. As a result, the rest of the movie are just sort of meandering around. The youthful cast is just sort of there. David Koechner and David Hasselhoff ham up their roles to a certain degree of amusement, but for the most part, the movie feels devoid of focus and direction. The gore feels tame and uninspired, and the grand finale when the piranhas attack plays out like an overlong tired punchline. When the director runs out of ideas, he adds in random shots of murky water and topless females running around. The whole movie feels so cheap and creatively bankrupt, it is as if someone fished this film out from the Cinemax reject bin.
As for that penis-out-of-box scene, it’s not as good as you may think. It’s more absurd than darkly humorous, although this could be due to Jean-Luc Bilodeau’s effective impersonation of a piece of cardboard in this movie.
Piranha 3DD is just flat played out at the end of the day. It’s definitely in trouble when the only decent humor comes from its not-very-subtle title.
