Megapiraña

I was looking to a wonderful day watching the SyFy channel. DinoCroc and other silly, stupid movies. But, this movie was the worse. Bad acting, bad writing, bad cinematography, bad special effects....bad, bad, bad. I just can't accept a leading actor that makes Arnold seem like a linguist, piranhas the size of 737s (albeit, with slightly shorter flight range), and Greg Brady as a secretary of...? Of what? I love these movies, but not this one. I can't believe in this day and age that the special effects (especially the huge fish flying and swimming out of the water) could be sooooo bad. My GF said said "if you didn't like it it, it must have been the worse". It was. It is.

This is one of the worst movies I have seen on SyFy. Their ability to make good movies decrease with every new "original movie" they make. While the location shots were great the film itself was one of the worst I have ever seen. Paul Logan was the only good actor in the movie. It was hard to see Barry Williams diminish his star quality by doing such a low quality picture. Tiffany proves she has no acting skills at all. She could not deliver lines while doing anything else. One scene she was running from danger, had to stop, deliver lines and wait for someone to give her a cue to run again. The extras were just as bad! Doesn't look like they were given any direction in what to do. One scene they go to arrest the hero and he's not there. They just stood there and looked around, no movement just stood in look. I would only recommend this film to film students wanting to know what to do to make a quality film.

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.

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.

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.