PIRANHA 3DD

CONTAINS TITS AND SPOILERS. BUT MAINLY TITS.

Phwoooar! Get a load of the knockers on that one! Phwoooar! Look at that rack! Massive great big wobbly hooters! Tits! Er....plot? Characters? Suspense? Hang on a moment...... nope, sorry. But check out those jugs! Such is the ethos - one hesitates to use the word "mentality" - of this nipple-driven piece of low-grade trash with nothing on its mind but bloody monster attacks and naked women. To be honest, if they could have dropped the gore and piranha attacks completely and just spent the whole running time looking at naked women and pointing at tits, they probably would have done. Why didn't they just make a Girls Gone Wild video if that was what they really wanted?

Nominally (if not numerically), Piranha 3DD is a sequel to Alexandre Aja's equally trashy but less tit-obsessed Piranha, though save for a brief mention of the first film's events and a couple of supporting characters returning for cameos, there's no connection and you certainly don't need to have seen the first one. This time the fish have learned to use man-made waterways - drainage tunnels and wells and so forth - and may well be heading for The Big Wet, a brand new theme park full of Russian strippers running around with their norks out. Can hot marine biologist Danielle Panabaker (also the stepdaughter of the park's sleazy owner/manager) get it shut down before the fish arrive and start eating the guests on opening day?

Piranha 3DD is rubbish. That it has a trashy energy in places, plenty of gore (courtesy of Gary J Tunnicliffe), some laughs, and even a 3D effect which is slightly better than usual and certainly better than the conversion job on Alexandre Aja's film, doesn't make it anything but rubbish. Is it a softcore porn movie, a horror movie or an out-and-out spoof as it appears to be in its final stretch, as an aging David Hasselhoff turns up as himself in Baywatch mode and takes the rise out of himself? I'd have preferred far less presumably hilarious parodying (which plays as sub-Scary Movie knockabout and defuses the tension from a massed mutant piranha attack) and more straight blood-and-gore piranhageddon. It's the changing of tone from teen sex romp to horror movie to porno to sub-Zucker spoofing that means it all ends up as a mess. Even worse, it only manages to reach a slim 83 minutes after mercilessly padding the closing credits with outtakes, bloopers and general messing about (none of which are funny or interesting). And it ends, of course, with the unenticing promise of a third instalment.

By chance, LoveFilm sent me the remake of Joe Dante's energetically entertaining original and for all its hokey production values it's a lot more fun than either of the modern Piranha updates, and better made despite the lack of resources. Director John Gulager's made his name with trashy gore movies with the increasingly desperate Feast series, this is trashier and gorier, but really it's no better. There are a few laughs, but it's not enough. And there's way too much in the way of tits. Grow up.

**