Piranha 3DD

Director: John Gulager
Starring: Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd
Time Out rating:
Japanese title: Piranha Returns

The tempting trailer for this over-inflated sequel to 2010’s B-movie horror suggested that it would deliver pneumatic bliss and bloody piscine horror in equal measure. Synthetic, lifeless and shapeless, it offers nothing of the kind. The flesh-eating predators that attacked bathers in the earlier film have found their way through the domestic plumbing system to the raunchy Wet World water park, where lifeguards have been replaced by (‘water certified’) strippers.

Predictable marine mayhem ensues, but these are sluggish waters, stirred only occasionally by a piranha-nibbled penis, a self-mocking cameo by Baywatch hero David Hasselhoff or wave-cresting naked breasts. Too tepid to qualify as authentic grindhouse sleaze and too amateurish to match the knowing, tongue-in-cheek excesses of Alexandre Aja’s perfectly pitched original, Feast director John Gulager’s floundering follow-up makes a meal of the obvious. Ving Rhames is back from the dead sporting artificial legs equipped with shotguns like Cherry Darling’s in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. But even the gore is sporadic, poorly staged and unimaginative: as a result, this is neither fish nor foul.

Piranha 3DD opens at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya and T-Joy Oizumi on July 14