------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you weren't sure, then be sure- this is trash cinema. Sometimes that can be just fine, seeing a director and a group of actors you know and like knowingly taking on a trend that can, at its best, throw up a lot of laughs and make for a riotous time at the cinema. If you know and like Elisabeth Shue at her least interested, Jerry O'Connell at his most annoying, and a whole bunch of porn actresses, you will have a blast watching Piranha 3D.
I've made my thoughts on 3D perfectly clear in the past, but in this one particularly, it's annoying as hell. It's another one retro-fitted with 3D after the fact, marking another tremendously lazy oversight for a film that was always going to be sold on its bespectacled visual appeal. As a result, a lot of it looks crummy, with ghosting, colour loss and all the other regular bugbears that made this the only film which I stumped up for the stereoscopic version of for some time.
The other major appeal is going to be the scantily clad women, most of whom have probably shown more in their more prolific porno work. I know for a fact that Kelly Brook showed as much in the execrable erotic thriller Three, but if you really need to see her swimming around underwater with Riley Steele, both entirely naked and snogging each other, to the strains of Delibes' The Flower Duet, then you can safely wait for the DVD. Guys, what you're thinking of doing after that description, you're generally not allowed to do in the cinema- see the problem with putting Jizzneyland on the big screen?
I will give it points for honesty though- it's all-out, crazy trash of the trashiest kind and they know it. To merely call it navel-gazing would omit its equal love for booby-gazing, ass-gazing, gore-gazing and CG-piranha gazing. In all respects but the pacing, which saves all the gross-out action you really came to see for the last 20 minutes, it's pretty competently put together. There is definitely an audience who will find all of this to be brilliant if breviloquent fun.
Me, I had more fun with Snakes on a Plane a few years ago, which shot for the same audience that this one does. If I really desperately needed to see tits when that film came out, I would have went on the Internet. Because I was 15, not because I can't find tits in real life. Uh... this movie sucks! It's aiming to be a guilty pleasure, but the operative part of that equation is the pleasure. If you don't enjoy this, like I didn't, then you're just left with the guilt.
For some, it'll do exactly what it needs to, but it goes without saying that there's nothing on offer to a female audience, and that any males' intentions would probably be better served by waiting for the DVD and ruining a few socks then instead. You wouldn't fork out to see the recent lower-budgeted Asylum flick Mega-Piranha on the big screen, so don't waste your money on the same thing just because it had more money thrown at it.
Piranha 3D is now showing in 3D (duh) at cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If and when you see Piranha 3D, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If only Christopher Lloyd had got to say "Where they're going, they don't need water!" at the end, to set up for a remake of that James Cameron one where the piranha can fly.
I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.