Ving Rhames

CHICAGO – “Piranha 3DD” is such a pathetic excuse for entertainment that it doesn’t even deserve to be regarded as a film. It’s just soft-core porn stuffed with shoddy special effects. The titillation factor is zilch and the scare factor is even lower than that. Even frat boys under the influence of multiple drugs may have difficulty finding this dreck watchable, let alone funny.

CHICAGO – “Piranha 3D” was a flawed film to be certain but it looks like a horror/comedy masterpiece compared to the dull mess that is the virtually straight-to-DVD follow-up, “Piranha 3DD,” opening on a whopping 75 screens today and also available On Demand.

CHICAGO – In our latest blockbuster edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 50 admit-two movie passes up for grabs to the advance Chicago screening of the new film “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”!

CHICAGO – “Piranha” is ludicrous, offensive, disgusting, gratuitous, and stupid — just the way that it should be. Can you imagine the complete failure it would have been to try and take the concept of killer fish seriously? Director Alexandre Aja (“High Tension”) wisely went the other way and made a movie that falls completely flat in terms of character, dialogue, and logic but works where it needs to: T, A, and gore.

CHICAGO – In our latest action/thriller edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: DVD, we have 10 DVDs up for grabs to the new DVD “Death Race 2” with Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames!

CHICAGO – With a record-setting approach to bare breasts and bloodied bodies, Alexandre Aja’s “Piranha 3D” is a ridiculous gore-fest that falls completely flat in terms of character, dialogue, and logic but pops off the screen in the areas in which it really counts for a movie about prehistoric man-eating fish.

CHICAGO – As someone who has often gone home with a straight-to-DVD action movie that I hadn’t heard of before entering the video store, I know how easy it is to get drawn into something that looks a little bit left-of-center. “Operation: Endgame” is undeniably unusual but that doesn’t mean it’s any good.

CHICAGO – We have grown accustomed to experiencing the world through technology. One of the great gifts cinema grants us is the ability to experience the world vicariously through the lives of others. The reason why mainstream movie stars are unnaturally beautiful and glamorous is because they represent how we’d like to envision ourselves.

CHICAGO – Many editions of the DVD Round-Up have featured a different genre and focus for each title within it. This week seems a little more thematically linked as we have a trio of foreign horror films and a few more independent films than usual. Of course, there has to a holiday comedy to spice things up.

CHICAGO – I am an unabashed defender of nearly everything that David Mamet has ever made and the arrival of another one of his films under the Criterion banner makes for a special occasion in this critic’s household. The new release of Mamet’s “Homicide” (1991) is a must-own for fans of one of the most important playwrights of the last fifty years and an underrated filmmaker as well.