"Piranha 3DD" (2012) d/ John Gulager

As David Hasselhoff arrives at the "Big Wet" waterpark for a grand opening promotion in tonight's review, the sequel to Alexandre Aja's remake of a 1978 Joe Dante cult classic as handled by the guy who gave you Feast (2005), its two direct-to-video sequels, and a tv-movie about zombies, he proclaims to himself, "Welcome to rock bottom." We as viewers were aware of this certainty as early as the pre-credits sequence that features Clu Gulager, Gary Busey, and a waterlogged bovine corpse farting out giant pool ball-sized prehistoric piranha eggs. Not very high brow stuff we're covering here this time around, huh...


Move over, Casablanca :"Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina."
Judging by the aforementioned intro, it would seem that the bass-sized meat eaters have survived the humans previous onslaught at Lake Victoria and have set their fish-eyed sights on Big Wet, an adult-themed water park on Cross Lake run by an unscrupulous money-hoarding, boob-ogling, light bulb head named Chet (David Koechner), who's got the local deputy, Kyle (Chris Zylka), in his pocket, and his visiting step daughter, Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) on his case, for replacing the lifeguards with water-certified strippers. Lots of topless bobblers bounce to and fro in slo-mo to fully beat this point into submission. Meanwhile, Maddy is a hot commodity to both Deputy Kyle, who she's hooked up with in the past, and lowly water park employee, Barry (Matt Bush), who spears trash with a trident and shuffles along in a shark costume. Her friends Ashley and Travis meet a watery end in a dated-looking party van, and her virgin pal Shelby has her genitals infiltrated by an embryonic piranha. After Maddy and Shelby are nearly snacked upon by the invading predators, the kids set out to visit Mr. Goodman (Christopher Lloyd), who's been locked away, studying the fish and gleefully stealing You Tube hits from "Laughing Diarrhea Baby".


Hasselhoff daydreams of simpler times and more challenging roles, like "Boner" in Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976).
Stressed out by the coming catastrophe, Shelby demands that Josh fuck her, right there, only to have the baby piranha that's been living inside her wriggle downstream and bite the poor kid's prick tip off, mid-coitus. Meanwhile, Maddy is haunted by nightmares of being attacked by piranhas who rudely interrupt her tubby time and Chet is hearing zero piranha warnings from anybody with the park's lucrative grand opening upon them, with aging celebrity, David Hasselhoff (himself, naturally), on board overseeing the event as a faux lifeguard, in between drunken hotel menage a trois with young groupies while writing future pop hits for Germany like "Love Hunter", that is. Opening day brings more quivering slo-mo boobs on the water slides, and splish-splashy teen male chauvinist fun, even drawing a hilariously aquaphobic Ving Rhames back to reprise his role as the heroic Deputy Fallon from the original remake, now legless, and pushed around by that gap-toothed comedian, Paul Scheer, for more cheap laughs. Without further elaboration, you already know how this is all going to end up...


She's just upset that the head is bigger than her blood-soaked breasts. Somehow.
Danielle Panabaker has scored herself countless television appearances, as well as roles in the Friday the 13th (2009) and Crazies (2010) remakes. Adrian Martinez is probably best known for following Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers around with a foam cheese wedge on his head and shouting "Heeeey Radjahs! Discount double check!" in those asinine, witless commercials. It's only fitting he's here fucking a pool filter and getting bitten up the ass by piranhas. Three people (!) wrote the screenplay, rife with dialog gems like : "She's afraid to have sex 'cause her slutty cousin gave birth to a flipper baby." Yeah, it's a glorified SyFy original with a five million dollar budget and jiggling juggies in 3D, and nobody's going into it expecting Don't Look Now (1973) or Daughters of Darkness (1971). I think it wears a single Wop like an Intercontinental Wrestling Championship belt. You might even be inclined to agree with me.


"What did I tell you about going into the water less than twenty minutes after eating, young man ?!!?"

"Exorcist 2:The Heretic"(1977)d/John Boorman

ca·tas·tro·phe/kəˈtastrəfē/Noun
1. An event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering.
Usually, when a sequel fails, it's because it serves up a whole lot more of the same things the first movie provided to an audience who believed they wanted more of those things after enjoying them the first time round, then discovering that the familiarity that has replaced the excitement they originally felt has left them, more often than not, kinda flat.Duplicating all the wonderful, horrible things that make The Exorcist a genuinely terrifying box-office smash and one of the greatest horror movies of all-time apparently wasn't an option in John Boorman's sequel four years later, as Heretic not only avoids them completely, it seeks an identity all its own:a deliriously overblown, badly acted, perplexingly scareless, heavy-handed, putrid disaster full of unintentional laughs.The producers seemingly ignored the fact that William Peter Blatty and Billy Friedkin walked away from a creative pow-wow convinced that an effective sequel wasn't in the cards, and went ahead and evacuated their cinematic bowels anyway, with dollar signs in their eyes, resulting in shame and embarrassment for anyone foolish enough to put their name on this picture.Every aspect of this movie is effectively ineffective:Linda Blair balked at appearing in possession makeup of any kind, opting instead to reveal her teen chunkiness and inability to act worth a lick to the world, forever damning herself to roles in driftwood like Roller Boogie(1979) and Zapped Again!(1990).Never to be out-hammed, the oft-sozzled Richard Burton shouts every line and sweats like John Wayne Gacy if he guest starred on Xusa.James Earl Jones looks rightfully humiliated in his giant locust suit.Director Boorman(who hated the original!!!), normally on point, has nothing to work with here.Even maestro Ennio Morricone's soundtrack is a mishmosh of suspenseless bromidic disco rock that the Solid Gold Dancers wouldn't boogie to.The punchless story is farther from coherence than a Turkish Star Wars(Haven't reviewed that gem yet, have I? Hmmmmm)script as written by Ted Geisel.The MPAA must have imposed their R rating on the film out of pity since there's no nudity, sex, profanity, or violence either.In fact, I'm of the belief that the phrase "epic fail" was coined at a Heretic screening.

Wait.What.
A sweaty, loud priest named Lamont(Burton) is assigned by the Cardinal(Paul Henried) to the Church's investigation into Father Merrin(Max Von Sydow)'s mysterious death while performing an exorcism four years earlier at the MacNeil's residence.His inquiries first lead him to Regan(Blair), who only seems to be possessed these days by a slow metabolism and a burning desire to spend the whole running time wearing little else but unflattering sequined tap costumes and low cut nighties and says airheadedly, "I was possessed by a demon.Oh, but it's okay, he's gone now!".Seriously.While her actress mother is somewhere "on location"(translation:Ellen Burstyn wisely passed on this one), Regan has been roughing it in a lush Manhattan penthouse, still cared for by Sharon(Kitty Winn, who wasn't as wise as Burstyn it would seem) and treated by a psychiatrist named Tuskin(Louise "Cuckoo's Nest" Fletcher, who should have known better), who straps the girl's ample forehead and her own into what looks like an old wood grain eight track player with a lightbulb to travel into each other's subconscious via hypno-telepathy where the original exorcism plays out between Merrin and an obvious Regan stand-in (who didn't refuse to wear possession makeup) that causes Tuskin's heart to "fibrillate"(translation:heave suggestively and make inappropriate lusty noises) in the same manner that Merrin's did.Lamont, who's never seen or used this contraption before, mind you, exclaims "I know where she is! Help me to find her!" and goes under himself, prepared to hypnotize her heart back into beating normally. Later, Regan dreams of Pazuzu, who has taken the guise of a swarm of locusts(huh?) when he isn't possessing people with healing powers, preventing man's inevitable cerebral evolution where he will have achieved oneness with God, after Lamont later hypno-raps with the demon about it.He approaches the Cardinal with the idea of a Church-funded(!) trip to Africa(!!) to seek a man named Kokumo(James Earl Jones) who had survived Pazuzu's onslaught of hungry grasshoppers as a boy, and thus, might be able to teach him how to show Regan to oust the dormant do-badder.

I suppose this'd be terrifying if you were an unsprayed cabbage leaf.
In Africa, Lamont admits to tribesmen that he knows the circumstances behind their holy man's untimely plummet-to-death years earlier by flying there with Pazuzu during a trance(!!!), getting shelled with rocks by the nubians while a sequined Regan feels his pain at an embarrassing interpretation of "Lullaby of Broadway" thousands of miles away, taking a flopper off the stage.The combo priest/human sweat sprinkler system flies to the village of Jepti with the aid of Ned Beatty(what I said about Winn and Fletcher earlier?The same goes for you, Ned) and through telekinesis uses Regan(who's not hooked up to the contraption btw) to get the demon to help him track down the one man who'd defeated him in the past.Yeah, makes sense.Kokumo first appears to Lamont as a disgruntled tribesman-in-a-giant-locust-suit(think A Christmas Story's Ralphie-in-the-bunny-jammies uttering gems like,"If Pazuzu comes for you I will spit a leopard", and by "leopard", he means a sloppy cherry tomato) then as a scientist researching..drumroll... the damaging effects of locust swarms in Africa(what else).Lamont sweatily queries,"When the wings have brushed you … is there no hope once the wings have brushed you?"(verbatim btw, no exagerration) and Kokumo shows him a new breed of female "good locust" that has a calming effect on the evil swarm.A stroke of symbolism as artistically painted by a roller, methinks.After a cheap mixture of phony and real harrowing airplane sequence obviously thrown in to cash in on the disaster craze so popular at the time, Lamont and Regan end up at the Georgetown residence only to be pelted by packing-peanuts-painted-brown-to-resemble-locusts as thrown in front of a wind machine by production assistants, and confronted once again by Regan's possession double who morphs into what-shoulda-been-a-horny-slut-temptress-but-only-comes-off-as-a-gussied-up-busty-chipmonk and tries to seduce Lamont, who sweatily mauls the scantily-dressed teenager(!).Finally coming to his senses, he rips the impostor's heart out of her chest, signalling another locust/packing peanut swarm, which the real Regan dispatches by swinging an imaginary bullroarer over her head like a lasso while spinning in place.Wait.What.Then Tuskin, who's been outside chaotically battling a possessed Sharon the whole time while the building literally cracked open for some reason, turns Regan's guardianship over to the priest.Huh?If you're confused reading this, just wait 'til you actually watch it.

"You are gonna march yourself down off of that altar, and you are gonna call Aunt Mbvotu and thank her for your adorable new locust jammies, young man!"
Also deserving of embarrassment here is an uncredited pre-Diff'rent Strokes Dana Plato as a young autistic stutterer(really!).Well, let's let the poor girl rest in peace, instead.Then there are the names(Walken, Fonda, Carradine, Ann-Margret, Sarandon, Segal, Voight, Nicholson, Kubrick) who either turned down the movie outright, or wisely disappeared pre-stench.During the notorious premiere, the audience laughed and even threw things at the screen at a Hollywood Blvd. theater.Don't listen to the sparse few advocates kicking around the notion that Heretic "isn't as bad as all that", woprophiles, it's that laughably bad and worse.One wop.

You should be swinging that imaginary bullroarer at your agent's head, Linda.