Years ago the great American movie critic Pauline Kael made it safe to enjoy bad movies. "Because movies are so rarely great art, if we can’t appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them," she wrote.

Based on early reviews, "Piranha 3D" sounded like great trash — a lightweight exploitation movie with a sense of humor to accompany its buckets of gore and gratuitous bare boobs. It goes out of its way — and then some — to be an outrageous, mindless good time, and in trying so hard to please it becomes exhausting. In a short while, the movie becomes something like a loud, drunken party guest whose dirty jokes prove embarrassing instead of amusing. ...read more.