Piranha 3DD | Movie review

Christopher Lloyd in Piranha 3DD

You can’t spell Piranha 3DD without 3D. Alas, unless you’re willing to drive to the suburbs, you also can’t see it in 3-D. This stereoscopic sequel-to-a-remake has bypassed Chicago movie houses entirely. The slight—and the movie’s same-day-as-theaters VOD release—probably has something to do with its jaw-dropping awfulness. Though not exactly high art—or even especially good genre filmmaking—Alexandre Aja’s 2010 Piranha went so far over the top with its outrageous underwater carnage that it achieved a kind of bad-taste bliss. There are no such sinful pleasures here; Feast director John Gulager’s follow-up is so ineptly staged it makes its predecessor look like Jaws.

Having turned the sunbathing, water-skiing population of Lake Victoria into an all-you-can-eat buffet, the franchise’s carnivorous, prehistoric school swims upstream to another beach community. The new menu includes Gary Busey as a drunken local, David Koechner as the proprietor of a sleazy water park, and—in the film’s dopiest casting stunt—David Hasselhoff as himself. Gorehounds can count a gruesome deflowering as the lone touch of inspired nastiness. Horndogs can bemoan the relative scarcity of promised skin. And amateur MST3K–ers can take the night off; ripping on a movie this incompetently shot and written is as rewarding as shooting fish in a barrel. (Available now on VOD.)