Piranha 3DD

PIRANHA 3DD

** SPOILERS **

"Welcome to Rock Bottom."

Truer words were never spoken. The man who utters them, David Hasselhoff, ends up dominating the latter portion of Piranha 3DD, hogging up the lion's share of screen time while a fish massacre occurs in the water park behind him. To reward him for signing on to play himself, the 1,200 credited producers for Piranha 3DD treated The Hoff like he's Marlon Brando. What terrible disease does Hasselhoff have to pay for that he took this blatant cash grab? Oh right, alcoholism. 

Piranha 3D was lightning in a fish tank. For some reason - that reason being go for broke, utter, gleeful shamelessness - Piranha 3D worked like a charm. The naughty je ne sais quoi of the original is completely missing from this half-baked, bottom-feeding sequel. Although to their credit - is "credit" the right word? No. - the sequel does remember a piranha ate a penis in the first one so they do it again, this time with some John Wayne Bobbit action and with a riff on Alien starring Katrina Bowden from 30 Rock for good measure. You'd think a girl would notice if a day ago, a piranha swam up her vagina. Think again.

A year after the events in the first movie, a water park in Merkin County (heh) called The Big Wet ("3DDs Swim for Free!") owned by sleazeball Todd Packer from The Office is threatened by another swarm of disgusting CGI piranha. Warned by returning piranha scientist Christopher Lloyd, Packer's stepdaughter, "marine biologist" Danielle Panabaker and her charmless, dim bulb friends are all that stand in the way of a much less gory, much less interesting or entertaining repeat of fish-on-man death dealing. Also having a walk on, to an extent, is comeback kid Ving Rhames, who tries to overcome his newfound fear of water and briefly fights off the piranha like Rose McGowan in Planet Terror. This is a movie where a toy plastic trident is the deadliest weapon known to man or piranha.

What results is predicable but no fun. The nudity is upped in quantity but not in quality - nothing here comes close to the underwater skinny dipping ballet performed by Riley Steele and Kelly Brook in Piranha 3D. Elizabeth Shue and Adam Scott, or any remains of him, are nowhere to be found. All that's left is cheapo, amateurish shlock clocking in at a little over an hour plus 10 minutes of bloopers over the credits, mostly starring Hasselhoff. 3DD gives the Piranha franchise a bad name.