Not Quite Fun in the Sun

The Piranha movies are not good. I feel like I should just be clear and up front about that right now. While the original Piranha from all the way back in 1978 is amusing as a kind of Jaws parody, most of the films in the weird, sprawling franchise made up of remakes and largely unrelated sequels have just been bad. Piranha ‘95 was a watered down version of the original and Piranha 3D from 2010 was amusing but not a good film by any means. These are movies that largely know they’re jokes, and the only reason they work at all is because they know how bad they are. When they take themselves seriously they’re just unbearable to watch.

Thankfully Piranha 3DD (aka Piranha DD if you watch it in a non-3D version) knows it’s meant to be a bad movie. That at least makes some of the decisions in the film more bearable. It’s campy, it’s silly, and it provides more of what most viewers of Piranha 2010 liked about that remake: dumb humor and lots of nudity. The film doubles down (because, haha, Double-D) on the nudity and dumb humor, going to as hard an R as it could while still getting released in theaters. And, yes, it did try for some 3D elements, just as with the previous film, all to get those extra sweet 3D dollars.

And yet, despite the attempt to give the viewers of the 2010 remake more of everything they wanted (since that film managed to rake in $83.1 Mil against a $24 Mil budget, making it a solid success for, ew, The Weinstein Company), this sequel failed to find life at the Box Office. A much worse film in almost all respects (unless all you wanted was gratuitous nudity), Piranha 3DD failed to repeat the success of its predecessor, only making $8.5 Mil against a fairly miniscule $7.5 Mil budget which, by Hollywood match, makes it an outright bomb. There’s a reason we haven’t seen another film in this franchise since 2012.

The film takes place a year after the events of Piranha 2010, which is known, in universe, as “the massacre at Lake Victoria”. Everyone assumes that the prehistoric piranha that killed all those people have died off, but in reality they only moved upstream, looking for a new source of fresh bodies to feast upon. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a convenient water park up by Cross Lake that is going to reopen for the summer season, right in time for the piranha to find new victims.

That waterpark is co-owned by Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) and her step-father Chet (David Koechner) and since Chet is majority owner of the park (with fifty-one percent of the controlling shares) he can remake the park anyway he wants, which he did, turning it into an adult fun park. Yes, that means there’s plenty of alcohol as well as an adults-only section that allows for fully nude skinny dipping. Chet thinks this is a wonderful idea, despite Maddy’s protestations, but to make it happen he’s had to pay off the local sheriff’s deputy, Kyle (Chris Zylka). But all that chlorine the park is pumping into the water eventually ends up in the nearby lake, and it confuses the piranhas making them more violent and more likely to come to the waterpark. And if they do there’s going to be a lot of very naked, very dead partiers on opening day.

Piranha 3DD was directed by John Gulager, who became famous when he was selected by Project Greenlight to direct their selected script in the third season of that show. That film was the monster horror feature Feast (which I really need to get around to reviewing at some point) and Gulager followed that up with Feast II: Sloppy Seconds and Feast III: The Happy Finish. As you can probably tell from those titles, Gulager was likely the right person to hire to make a nudity-filmed sex-comedy slash monster feature. And that might have really been the case if it weren’t for the fact that Gulager seems totally checked out as a director for this film.

Piranha 3DD has one really amusing idea – what if Piranha but even dumber and with more nudity – and it spells it all out in its title. As someone that has watched just about every film in this series so far (one day I’ll track down a copy of 1982’s Piranha 2: The Spawning) I did give an amused chuckle when I saw the title for this film. Like, at least the movie knows what it is and it’s leaning into it, right? But the fact is that the end result doesn’t justify that amusing title or all the time wasted on this boring ass movie.

That is the biggest flaw of this film: for all its attempts at comedy, for all the weird ideas it actually does raise and then abandon, the film is boring as hell. By and large this is just a tasteless retread of the previous movie. It has the same basic plot structure – piranhas are around, someone tries to warn the people in charge about the piranhas, they are ignored, and then people die because of the piranhas – but it handles it with less grace, less gore, and far less horror than even the 2010 film could manage. It’s just a much worse copy of the previous films.

I want to think that there was a version of this film, at some point in the scripting stage, that was better than this. The film has some interesting ideas that it makes a nod towards, such as the fact that the piranhas start trying to impregnate women to act as incubators for piranha babies. This is alluded to early in the film when a dead cow is seen (ew) squirting out eggs as it floats in the water. Then, later, one of the main female characters ends up with a piranha egg up in her body (after going skinny dipping) and then ends up giving birth to a piranha in the middle of sex (this really is a stupid movie). You would think, with that kind of setup, this would be a major plotline for the film, adding in some real body horror to the franchise. I could respect that as it would be a new idea and would add a lot of solid horror to all the scenes of skinny dipping the film shoehorns in.

But no, after that character has her sex-fish incident, the whole matter is dropped and never raised again. It makes me wonder if there was more intended for this story thread or if it was all meant for one cheap gag and a bit of weird sex horror in one scene. If it was the former and most of that material got cut out, at least I respect the attempt. If it was the latter, though, then I think all of this material should have been cut out of the film entirely as it adds nothing of consequence to the film at all.

Meanwhile, the film doesn’t even really understand how to insert humor into its own festivities. Yes, the title is amusing enough the first time you see it, but it’s also the funniest part of the film by far. The movie seems to think piranhas biting people’s junk, or creepy men leering at naked women, is the height of humor. Oh, and it thinks David Hasselhoff is funny as hell, so a lot of time in the last act is given over to this washed up actor who can’t act and isn’t funny, all so it can use him for “jokes”. It doesn’t work and all it really does is distract from what’s really going on while padding the runtime of the film.

And that’s a key thing to realize: this movie barely even makes it up to full movie length. Clocking in at 82 minutes, the film has so much padding that you have to assume every single frame filmed was used in the film product. It’s a movie with a threadbare story, barely any scares, and even less humor that, in the end, goes nowhere in its truncated runtime. 82 minutes is painfully short, but then that’s par for the course with this movie as everything else about it is also painful as well.

Piranha 3DD was likely never going to be a good movie, but in the right hands, and with a better script, it might have at least been watchable. Even at its worst the Piranha films have never been this dreadfully dull before, even as they recycled plotlines, footage, and whole scripts. If Piranha 3DD showcases anything it’s that there are depths of mediocrity this franchise hadn’t yet plumbed, at least until this sequel came along.