John’s Horror Corner: Piranha 3DD (2012), proof that some horror remakes are just plain gratuitous!

MY CALL:  If you liked Piranha 3D then this is worth a watch and maybe even a blind buy.  It’s every bit as funny or funnier in some ways, but the big finale is a big nothing compared to its predecessor and I believe that is the major reason the most negative online reviews strongly favoring the original.  IF YOU LIKE THIS WATCH:  Want funny and gross-out goretastic?  Drag Me to Hell (2009), Piranha 3D(2010), Final Destination 5 (2011), Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2011), The Cabin in the Woods (2012).  SIDEBAR:  This is a sequel of a remake of an original (1978’s Piranha) that has a sequel (1981’s Piranha 2: The Spawning), but this sequel is not a remake of the original sequel (which, by the way, was about piranhas that fly!).  TRAILER:  Click here to go to the Piranha 3DD Trailer Talk.

Taking place in some other lake in Arizona, this sequel begins with a foreboding reflection of Piranha 3D (2010) and a cameo by the crazier-than-life Gary Busey.  As if that wasn’t a slap in the face to taking a movie seriously, then enters David Koechner (Final Destination 5) and his double-D T’n’A advertisement for “The Big Wet,” his unsubtly named water park for adults lifeguarded by sexy, string bikini’d Cuervo girls.  The sloppy innuendo-rich commercial would likely disgust even the pioneers of Girls Gone Wild.  If there was a movie Freakonomics calculation called breast time it would be measured in breast seconds—the total number of breasts in a movie times the number of seconds that each breast is bare—then this movie’s breast second tabulation would result in a breast time of 300% of the movie’s actual running time.  It’s truly shameful.

While the above image does not continue to the “Breast Time” calculation…well, you get the point.

We transition from Girls Gone Wild to the opening scenes in American Pie as a bunch of just-out-of-college-aged friends are seeing each other for the first time in a long time (last summer, I suppose), romantic interests and tensions are introduced along with the gawky guys who never get it and the hunky ones getting all of it, and every chick is doable and playfully DTF.  These girls include Maddy (Scream Queen Danielle Panabaker; The Ward, Friday the 13^th) and Shelby(Scream Queen Katrina Bowden; Nurse 3-D, Tucker and Dale vs Evil ).

This scene represents the stupidest moment in the entire movie–and, yes, there was a distinctly stupidest moment.  Here Maddy (Panabaker), a grad student in marine biology, goes swimming in the dark water alone at night with plenty of exposed skin to see if piranhas have infested the lake yet.  BRILLIANT!

Prophesied by the opening scenes, some very, very inappropriate shit happens in this movie—aside, of course, from the fact that a guy in a movie with “DD” in the title actually says “I’ve never been into girls with big breasts” in an effort to get lucky with a cute chick with small ones (Katrina Bowden).  People pray before sex in what can only be described as a van called “the sin bin” (and then, of course, die before getting it in), piranhas swim into vaginas, Bowden [imaged below] says “I think something is really wrong with me [because that would turn anyone on, right?] and if it is I don’t want to die a virgin”

and then a dude goes for it, then the piranha in her vajayjay eats his dick and we see waaaay too much during this scene which lasts longer than you’d expect, a piranha goes up a guy’s ass, David Hasselhoff refers to a small boy as a little ginger moron after the kid is killed in the face by a piranha, and a David Koechner’s severed head gets some bloody double-D motorboat action.

The best movie moment had to be the following quote:  “Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina!”  I had to rewind that one IMMEDIATELY to see cute little Katrina Bowden say that line with a straight face again.

Have no fear, the cameos don’t stop with Gary Busey.  Christopher Lloyd is back!  He cracks the code and figures out why the locals are at risk—it has something to do with chlorine by-products and…wait a minute!  We have a huge, STD-filled water park; that’s a LOT of chlorine.

And Ving Rhames gets a double-piranha amputee cameo and he says (to the water at a water park, mind you!) “I’m not afraid of some punk-ass water” over and over again like a mantra.  When the bloody eruption of piranha gore arrives, Rhames goes all gun-legged Grindhouse and we get to see Hasselhoff’s double-Ds bouncing in slow motion.

This attempt at gross-out gore overkill is nothing when compared to the echelons-better Piranha 3D.  It’s still fun, but it fails the franchise and even fails the earlier scenes of this movie.

This is good, old-fashioned sophomoric bro-fun.  Enjoy…