The 2010 remake of Piranha was hardly a great film (neither was Joe Dante's original, for that matter), but it's still surprising just how crap this tedious sequel is in comparison. As anyone who has seen the third season of Project Greenlight will know, John Gulager is truly an oddball director. Goofy and introverted, but you still kind of want to root for him, and it helps that he has a pretty good eye and sense of style. Or at least he had. The end result of Project Greenlight, monster flick Feast, hardly broke any new ground, but it looked good and entertained well enough.

None of those qualities are evident in Piranha 3DD.

Everything about this movie screams lazy, all the way from the top (direction) down to, oh I don't know, let's assume the catering sucked. The worst offender by far is the script, courtesy of Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan – writers on all of Gulager's movies, in fact (the Feast trilogy and this). It's simply stunning how little effort has been put into writing a story that is, you know, at least vaguely entertaining. Piranha 3DD is satisfied with tossing up a flimsy setup so that it can hurry from money shot to money shot (ranging mostly from beautiful women in various stages of undress, to CGI fish masticating on their body parts moments later). None of the characters behave even remotely like actual people – or even like the dumb cast of your average, mediocre teen slasher, for that matter. I realize that asking for well-rounded characters in a movie with its mind clearly focused on boobs and killer fish is unrealistic, but asking for characters whose actions at least make some sort of sense shouldn't be. But no, we're left with nothing but ragdolls on strings in the hands of a senseless script, making it all but impossible to care much about anything that happens to them. So I didn't.

In the end, the cast is attractive and likable – and often undressed – so it'd be a lie to say that this was a complete waste of time. But it's close.