Fridae

Piranha 3D was one of its year's better surprises. Any movie that knows how to feature a 'first victim' cameo by Richard Dreyfuss playing apparently the same character he played in Jaws, an underwater makeout scene between two girls set to Lakme's Flower Duet, and featured an inventively choreographed scene resembling a Rube Goldberg-esque volley of death and destruction certainly gets my recommendation. Director Alexandre Aja knew to pay tribute to the roots of his movie, as well as bravely forge a new path in pushing the envelope of B-creature horror to a level of artistic playfulness rarely seen in the genre.

In comparison, its sequel looks and feels much like it should have been a direct-to-video piece, with an obviously lower budget than the first, much less invention and much less suspense or tension, it repeats the first's formula of a sex comedy-creature horror fusion tempered with cameos by 80s icons apparently knowing the words but not the music.

The story should you actually need to know it involves the piranha from the first film moving across a series of underwater lakes and reservoirs attracted by sulphur dioxide to a water park, which is releasing copious amounts of it in chlorine treatment of water. The water park is owned by the sleazy Chet (David Koechner) and his stepdaughter Maddy ( Danielle Panabaker), who is pursued by two boys: Josh (Jean Luc Bilodeau), a handsome deputy sheriff and Barry (Matt Bush), a skinny nerdy guy who works a job cleaning the water park. In preparation for the opening Ed has added new attractions to the park including an 'adults only' pool and non-professional ex-stripper lifeguards. When two of Maddy's fellow teens turn up dead after their van lands in the water of a nearby lake and another friend of Mandy's ends up with the world's deadliest anti-rape device thanks to a piranha swimming inside her, Maddy wants to close the park's reopening day celebrations, but hey, are you gonna close an event to which you have invited David Hasselhoff (playing a parody of himself and his singing career)?

The film's preference for irrelevant parody over irreverent inventiveness makes it all the poorer, so busily do director John Gulager and his writers Joel Soisson, and riff on its sex jokes and Hasselhoff parodying that when the dreaded piranha attack takes place, it is so underwhelming in its lack of scale and ambition that it ends up silly in a ridiculous sort of way rather than actually funny and/or scary. Smarting from its lower budget, apparently the piranhas only appear to attack a 0.9m wading pool and so many people are shown sunbathing that there is never any active sense of danger. Ving Rhames and Christopher Lloyd repeat their appearances from the first film, but there's only so much that their hamming up can do to liven the otherwise dull film, it's thankfully short, unless you want to be livened up by the many pointless outtakes and more Hasselhoff gags over the running credits.