Movie review: Piranha 3D

Piranha 3D
(R18), 88 minutes
Over the years, Hollywood has served up scores of classic films - The Godfather, Scarface, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy among them.
Piranha 3D is not one of these films.
However, what it is, is 90 minutes of big, bloody, often nude, stupid, gory fun.
Clearly, it's the sort of film which will only be suited to a certain kind of audience, and you'll get more out of it if you go into it knowing what to expect.
Gone With the Wind, this isn't.
The plot, such as it is, is the stuff B-grade film-makers' dreams are made of.
A huge earthquake under the small town of Lake Victoria opens up a deep chasm under the titular lake, freeing hordes of ravenous prehistoric piranhas.
Naturally, this freak event just happens to coincide with the annual Spring Break celebration, which has seen the town flooded with hordes of ridiculously good-looking and seemingly surgically enhanced teenagers, all out for a good time, which mainly seems to involves beer and nudity.
The film's hero, Jake Forester (hilariously, he's played by an actor going by the name of Steve McQueen) finds things go from bad to worse when his day tagging along with a crew shooting a soft porn flick gets rather badly thrown off course by half the town being slaughtered in increasingly grisly fashion by homicidal packs of piranha.

Piranha 3D is surprisingly gory, and the concluding scene involving the thousands of teens celebrating at the edge of the lake truly needs to be seen to be believed.
There's also enough shocks to please the average horror movie fan.
Yes, the dialogue is awful, yes, there's lots of nudity for no apparent reason, and yes, I think I probably lost about 10 IQ points just by sitting through Piranha 3D.
But here's the thing - it's fun. And the film-makers obviously knew they were hardly making Oscar-worthy material.
There's a surprisingly good cast too - Richard Dreyfuss turns up in a nice cameo with a nod to Jaws, Jerry O'Connell almost steals the show as the ridiculously over-the-top film producer Derrick Jones, and Christopher Lloyd uses his mad-scientist character to resurrect the spirit of Back to the Future's Dr Emmett Brown - if the good doctor were on crack.
The 3D effect is used sparingly, and perhaps could have been put to better use - although in the case of one scene (you'll know it when you see it), perhaps not at all.
Naturally, Piranha 3D's ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, a possibility which is now apparently set to become a reality, after this instalment's surprising success at the box office.
3/5