BEFORE: Well, this wasn't part of my original plan - but as I say very often, this will make some more sense tomorrow. This does feel a bit like a classic film, even though a lot of people make fun of it and hardly anyone takes it seriously these days. It's also kind of horror-ish, so it's a good lead-in perhaps as September comes to a close and we get ready for the annual Shock Block.
Yup, Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "The Kiss of the Spider Woman". Eventually I can say I've seen every film with her in it, and I won't have to watch any more. I think I'm close.
THE PLOT: A "National Geographic" film crew is take hostage by an insane hunter, who forces them along on his quest to capture the world's largest and deadliest snake.
AFTER: I'm so glad I watched that documentary about the making of "Jaws" back in July, because essentially this IS a rip-off of (or homage to) "Jaws". You just have to replace "shark" with "anaconda" and "holiday weekend in a New England coastal town" with "documentary film crew on the Amazon River to film a lost tribe". Oh, and instead of Robert Shaw as the crazy shark hunter, we have Jon Voight as the crazy snake hunter. See, it's basically the same movie!
While I don't know as many details about the making of "Anaconda", I've already read on IMDB that they had mechanical problems with the animatronic snake - because we're not LEARNING, people, we're just making the same mistakes over and over again! I think they did add a fair amount of CGI to make the snake appear to move around, that was just not an option back in the days of "Jaws" - but as a result, the snake doesn't appear very realistic here in some shots, and sometimes it's downright ridiculous. Can a giant snake really move THAT fast? Like in the "King Kong" and "Godzilla" movies they tended to slow down the footage (aka shoot at high speed, then play back regular) to make the gigantic monsters appear more gigantic-er, as they have to move their giant limbs through more space to walk around, that therefore takes longer. But no, OK, giant snake very fast in this one, almost too fast.
Nobody sets out to make a BAD film (except John Waters maybe) I think most everyone tries to make a GOOD film, it's just that not everyone succeeds. And so we have technical level SPFX bad, and campy ridiculous bad and poorly-written bad, and then there's bad acting bad. Well, it's a whole smorgasbord of those things here, take your pick. It's a KFC chicken, mashed potatoes and corn bowl, namely a bunch of sad items in a failure pile. OK, so there's a lot of action, if you like action that's like the gravy poured on top of the bowl of things. Gravy is almost always good, it can hide a lot of disappointing elements and at least your taste buds will be semi-satisfied here. If you're a fan of the Razzie Awards and the kind of films they tend to honor, then you maybe hit the jackpot here.
The film starts off with a poacher, played by Danny Trejo, who is threatened by an unseen creature (psst, it's a snake...) and once he's got nowhere else to turn, he commits suicide with his revolver. It's a smart move, getting out of the film early, for sure. The rest of the cast isn't so lucky, although Eric Stoltz plays an anthropologist who gets poisoned by a giant wasp and spends most of the movie recovering from the poison and the tracheotomy they had to perform so he could breathe. Really, another smart move, it's probably worth the effects of the poison if it means you can be unconscious half of the movie.
The horror movie part kicks in after the snake attacks, and we lose most of the cast, one by one, as if the snake is the masked serial killer in the forest and people who go off and have sex in the jungle are more vulnerable than the others. Commanding everyone to stay on the boat at night doesn't help much, it just means the snake is going to crush and devour anyone who falls off the boat or jumps off the boat for any reason. Hey, this is nature, just like in "Hoppers" if it's your turn to be food for a snake, that's just the way it goes, who are we to mess with the natural order of things?
Once the anthropologist is sidelined and the boat driver is eaten, it appears that the crazy snake expert is in charge. Excuse me, why isn't the film director in charge, just because she's a woman? That's sexist, and also the man is a poacher and insane, however since he's tempted a few of the crew with the promise of a $1 million payday for catching a giant anaconda alive, he's gotten enough people on his side, majority rules, and this kind of reminds me of how Trump won two elections.
The crew's boat gets jammed on the riverbed right by a waterfall - this might not have happened if the driver were still alive. But this forces a showdown with both the snake and the man trying to catch the snake, who gets a tranquilizer dart in his back and falls into the river. Well, since there's no body there's probably a 100% chance we'll see him again in a bit. The snake is shot several times in the head and dies, but you know, there's always the chance of a BIGGER snake appearing also. Then there's proof of how shoddily this film was made, because when the boat gets loose from the riverbed, there's a shot of the boat moving away which is JUST the shot of it getting stuck, but played in reverse. I say this because the waterfall was moving in the wrong direcion, and I'm fairly sure water doesn't flow UP.
The boat moves on to an abandoned sawmill, and surprise, the snake expert is there and second surprise, so is a bigger snake. SO there's another "final" showdown, with really the same solution that "Jaws" used - when in doubt, just blow stuff up. Tried and true, it always works.
Directed by Luis Llosa (director of "The Specialist")
Also starring Ice Cube (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Film Geek"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "The House of Mirth"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Kari Wuhrer (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Vincent Castellanos (last seen in "Eulogy"), Danny Trejo (last heard in Zootopia 2") and the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Deep Blue Sea").
RATING: 4 out of 10 buckets of monkey blood (look, I have no idea if snakes are attracted to it. does it really matter?)
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