Mega piraña

Everyone loves a bad monster movie, right? There is a great charm in the so-bad-it-is-good film, and for a while Mega Piranha delivers the goods. Alas, but then the unremitting awfulness wears you down due to endless repetition of scenes and CGI that is so bad that it can't be unintended (I hope). Add the unlikely return of a really rubbish villain (flying a helicopter that seems to be able to circumnavigate the whole world), and a truly bizarre finale that suggests that everyone just got bored and pulled the plug, and you just have ultimate tedium (well, for me, at least). Still, it is not everyday that you get to see Tiffany playing a hydro-biologist, and I'm hoping to see Britney Spears as a Navy Seal in 'Mega Shrimp' and Ke$ha as the US President in 'Monster Manatee' vs. Giant Gecko' some time soon.

Devouring everything in its path with ruthless efficiency, wiggling a bloated swollen tail to propel itself from one disaster scene to the next, can anything stop the menace of the Fat Chick Who Ate Tiffany? We could consider the other merits of the movie, but it has none. None at all. It's a SyFy quota quickie, with the usual collection of embarrassingly awful CGI, an utterly nonsensical script made from scraps of coffee stained paper found in community film college trash cans, and a cast harvested from the rejects of daytime soap extra auditions.

So instead let's just cut to the chase and talk about the Name in this disaster of a disaster movie: Tiffany.

God damn, SyFy has made some bizarre choices in female leads. The criteria is simple enough: take some washed up has-been like Traci Lords or a desperate wannabe like Felicia Day who will work for cab fare and catering, shove them in front of a camcorder and film whatever they feel like shrieking. But at least with the like of Lords or Day, you probably kinda woulda, maybe. But Tiffany looks like she passed on the cab fare and just ate the catering. And everyone else's. And the caterers.

Granted, you can't complain about the quantity of T&A on screen, but the quality leaves a lot to be desired. She's about 2 supersized lunches away from being comedy fatso material, only without the laughs.

To be fair, if you're into chubby chasing, Tiffany has quite a soft milfy look to her pudgy face, and if SyFy had squeezed her into a corset and filmed her carefully, they might have made something watchable. But making her wobble and waddle from one shoddy location to the next must surely count as cruelty to the disadvantaged.

Mega Piranha is on, right now on the SciFi Channel (I refuse to call that channel what its actually been renamed; that's just bloody stupid). There are piranhas as big as jumbo jets jumping out of the river and exploding on impact. Some bad-ass martial arts dude just used some mixed martial arts to kill some baby piranhas which were as big as refrigerators. Anyway, I was just talking to a buddy of mine. Years ago back in junior high, my friends and I used to come up with stupid ideas for movies to pass the time away in school. Well, one of those ideas were about giant piranhas as big as Godzilla terrorizing some city. We were kids and we knew that was frig gin' stupid. But Asylum Films, they're laughing all the way to the bank. I went hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a master's degree to teach English Lit. to kids who don't even give a crap when I could have taken all those stupid ideas for movies way back in the day and made them for the SciFi Channel. Jesus! I am an idiot!

I had too much fun laughing at this to vote it lower than a 5.

Piranhas are already pretty fearsome creatures. So naturally, some scientists genetically mutate them. Things go wrong; the creatures escape into a Venezuelan river, and start to "grow exponentially." So a big guy on steroids named Fitch is sent to aid Venezuelan soldiers to fight the menace. They look like Castro impersonators, and end up chasing him around, for whatever reason.

When the Sec. of State looks like a Brady and is named Grady, you know the "Asylum" movie makers are just "winking at the audience." The action-film meets sci-fi motif is played with over-the-top gusto: look for piranha jumping high into the air and slamming their victims down like a sledgehammer. I didn't know they could do that. Even mutated ones. Steroid Fitch kick-boxes an entire school of piranha senseless in a great Jackie Chan moment. The super-sized creatures crash themselves into Key West hotels. Battleships get turned into Fish Filet sandwiches. The TV news reporter doing play-by-play of a piranha attack, the bit about tail fins, Col. Valdez inexplicably showing up in Florida; hilarious.

Most of the time it makes absolutely no sense what's going on, with absurd scientific plot holes everywhere. There's no intent for this to be taken seriously; and taken at face value it's classic B movie silliness.

If you are a fan of really bad movies, and I am, this is a must. I think it was conceived and written by a bunch of teen aged boys who aren't into women yet (no T and A). It has everything else that they love. It has lots of car chases in exotic locals, with big shiny American cars racing down dirt roads, lots of stuff blowing up, lots of shooting and a lot of really, really big fishies.

The dialog is what you would expect, also conceived by a bunch of little kids. The scenes along the river are just plain stupid. Why, when you know that the big fishies are able to jump for unknown distances, would anyone stand on a river bank.

It is doom from the word go...in every sense of the word.

I am 70 years old and have seen some really badly conceived plots and dialog, but this one is a keeper.