Well, like it or not, they're back. But now with more tits! Yes, the return of the little fish with big appetites could not, it seems, be stopped. No matter how dreadful the original film may have been, it made enough money to spawn a sequel, which is apparently all that is required to make another dreadful movie these days. Don't take my word for it based on this evidence. Saw has been doing it for years, not to mention several other franchises, which I am hoping against hope this is something Piranha will not become.
I'm not going to spend too much time on this as I think we all know that this really isn't worth the price of admission on the basis of storytelling and artistic merit. Slow motion vomiting and watching fat blokes wet-hump pool filters is not really my idea of a good time, but there you go. What it does have is a disproportionate amount of bare breasted young women and handsome brick-jawed young men all mucking about at a water park, the new killing fields for those same piranhas that ate most of the spring break revellers last time around.
With some quite inspired cameos, the film cannot be denied its efforts to entertain. How it goes about this, however, is something else. Shooting for the lowest common denominator should really be the mainstay of other, more graphic and less sociably accessible and acceptable projects.
There is a massive amount of blood-letting, some overly lurid and unpleasant deaths and you can see why the film has maintained the '18' rating that was delivered by the censors the first time around, as the tone and story does not improve with age.
In short, more of the same, that brings the occasional snigger, a jump here and there, but mostly regularly wincing at the general foulness of it all. This is a no-brainer of the best kind, with honest to goodness production values and some inspired direction and up front about its shortcomings even from the trailer, which is not something that can be said of some movies that purport to be something that they are not