Mega Piranha (2010) Review: Fish vs. Warships
“They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong.”Synopsis: A mutant strain of giant ferocious piranha escape from the Amazon and eat their way toward Florida. | ![]() Watch now on Amazon |
Calamity Brains:
As should be expected from a name like Mega Piranha, this is another one of those “science weeps” creature features. The growing piranhas “reach their next magnitude,” electricity causes reproduction, fish can chew through a warship, and a wildlife biologist (Tiffany) can fix helicopters. Even by B-horror creature feature standards, almost nothing in the movie is believable. In fact, let’s make a list.
Things that make Mega Piranha totally believable:
- “military” haircuts
- US Army uniforms on Venezuelan soldiers
- a wildlife biologist going on a Navy SEAL mission
- a Navy SEAL saying “nucular”
Mega Piranha also employs 1930s-level casting techniques: they only seemed two have two Hispanic actors, so those two got the bigger parts, and the rest of the “Venezuelans” were obviously whites who didn’t speak Spanish. (Despite the cringe-worthy casting, there’s still some surprisingly good sociopolitical commentary from The Asylum.)
Throughout, the movie employs a strange mix of CGI and stock nature footage. For starters, the filmmakers have clearly never seen the bottom of a river before – the footage they chose looks like ocean floor. And then on top of odd faux pas like that, the CGI is pretty bad… even for an Asylum flick. (And that’s saying something.) There’s also a CGI helicopter. Guys, was it really significantly cheaper to make a CGI helicopter than to just take some stock footage of a damn bird from somewhere?
Not to mention… okay, I know that in most creature features, the “happy ending” usually involves some ridiculous plan that only seems tangentially related to the problem. I’m used to that. But 90% of this movie is spent killing small portions of piranha, and never managing to kill them all… and then suddenly killing one piranha sparks a feeding frenzy that ends with them all murdering each other? That’s stretching things, even by creature feature logic standards.
Mega Piranha isn’t quite “so-bad-it’s-good,” but it’s close. If you’ve enjoyed any of the other ’80s pop star/giant creature mashups, you’ll probably like this flick a lot.
Calamity Brains’ Rating: B
Watch now on Amazon
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