Piranha 3D

Piranha 3D is a refreshingly honest film, in that at no point does it pretend to be anything other than an utterly tasteless and uninspired piece of cinematic trash. It works on the basic principle that in order to entertain the masses all you need are large quantities of attractive, barely-clad females and fake blood. Here, this concept is taken to its logical conclusion: an entire movie revolving around the premise of good looking young people being eaten alive by killer fish.

It is impossible to say in any way that Piranha 3D is a good film. Its ‘plot’, which consists of an earthquake that releases monstrous prehistoric fish that proceed to devour annoying young people on Spring Break, is about as clichéd as it comes, yet this is its whole point. Despite its gore and body count, it is more a comedy than a horror movie with its absurdly stupid storyline, script, gore and breast shots, conspiring to create a film that (intentionally or not) is highly amusing. The film parodies itself very well with its use of traditional movie clichés adding to the comic effect, encouraged by the ridiculously overdone acting of everyone, including the surprising appearance of one-time Oscar nominee Elizabeth Shue. By far the best example of this is Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyds’ wonderful little turn as an insane ichthyologist whose brief appearance is the highlight of the film.

However, this said, the film does become increasingly repetitive. Despite its inventiveness when it comes to death scenes, there are only so many ways monstrous fish can eat people. The same problem is also caused by the endless stream of bikini shots that become tiresome over the course of the film, shots which are of course essentially entirely gratuitous and add nothing to the film - with the key exception of the picture’s one moment of true originality, a truly bizarre, naked ‘aquatic ballet’ sequence, that seems oddly out of place with everything around it. Yet this cannot make up for the problems of repetition that are only exacerbated by the unnecessary and seriously dodgy 3D effect of the film. It adds nothing and looks disappointing, and can only really be said to detract from the film’s ridiculous visuals and thus the entire point of the movie.

Piranha 3D is a film that in every conventional sense should be an unmitigated disaster. And yet, due to the fact that down to the very core it is so utterly ridiculous, the end result becomes surprisingly entertaining, fitting definitively into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category of films. An entertaining guilty pleasure, which could never be considered anything more.

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