Release Date: August 27, 2004
Starring: Matthew Marsden, KaDee Strickland, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Johnny Messner
Directed by: Dwight H. Little
Written by: John Claflin, Daniel Zelman, Michael Miner, Edward Neumeier
Distributed by: Screen Gems
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (action violence, scary images, some language)
Some movie watchers will tell you that the first Anaconda is a good movie, which (I guess) is true in the sense that it is pretty easy to ridicule. But Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, the preposterously titled sequel directed by Dwight H. Little, should go a long way toward removing the scrappy luster from the 1997 original. A bad movie can be good as long as it’s the only one of its kind; two bad movies involving the same gigantic killer snakes, on the other hand, are no mistake.
The screenwriters behind Anacondas, the foursome of John Claflin, Daniel Zelman, Michael Miner, and Edward Neumeier, must have figured that pluralizing the title noun was the thing to do in sequels; after all, Aliens came after Alien (which means in a few years we’ll probably get Anaconda³). But there was more than one anaconda in the first movie, and there’s more than one here, which means that the presence of an S on the end of the title (or lack of same) is almost completely irrelevant. Sort of like the movie itself.
If you must see Anacondas, you may take some consolation in the sequel’s willingness to lay the odd claim to its predecessor. Presented with the enormous snakes, characters respond with the same degree of incredulity (“There are snakes this big out there?”). And a character, having already survived his first encounter with an anaconda, says he knows someone who knew a documentary crew that was eaten up by anacondas in the Amazon.
It’s a testament to the strength of Hollywood’s illusions about itself that none of the other characters bother to point out that he’s probably remembering the plot of Anaconda, or that the documentary crew in that movie wasn’t completely destroyed -- Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube survived (fictionally and nonfictionally), and presumably vowed never to have anything to do with anacondas in the movies again. I’d say the actors in Anacondas would probably make the same decision, except that none of them appears bright enough or talented enough to have much of a career past giant-snake movies.
The characters they play aren’t really geniuses, either. Matthew Marsden stars as Dr. Jack Byron, the head of an exploratory team, which includes his former flame, Samantha (KaDee Strickland), and a corporate lackey in charge of their funding (Salli Richardson-Whitfield), sent to the Indonesian island of Borneo in search of the Blood Orchid, a rare flower that may be the key to prolonging life. Also along for the ride is Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner), an ex-military type who has agreed to take them by river on his boat to the remote spot where the Blood Orchids can supposedly be found.
Unlike Anaconda, this movie doesn’t have a clue as to what it wants to do with these characters, other than lock them in a room with giant snakes -- which wouldn’t have been half bad. Anaconda was essentially the slasher picture transplanted into the framework of an Amazonian safari -- we knew which characters to like, which to hate, and by which rules the movie would abide. Every time two characters got within 10 feet of having sex, for instance, a snake would show up, much like a serpentine Michael Myers. Anacondas, on the other hand, wants to emulate the cheap thrills of the original without doing any work; this isn’t far removed from the B-grade creature features of 1950’s drive-ins.
The only difference between this movie and that long-dead genre are the special effects, which are admittedly much better than they were 50 years ago but, as in Anaconda, are still well below industry standards. The snakes honestly don’t make for great villains, since their enormity precludes any plausible agility -- their wild, thrashing, out-of-nowhere kill scenes are more laughable than frightening.
Anaconda, at least, knew enough not to rely on the snakes. It had Jon Voight’s creepy, leering snake hunter to do the dirty work; the snakes in that movie were secondary, there to clean up the mess. Anacondas eliminates this middle man, but loses a lot in the bargain. The scenes when the crew floats down the river aren’t nearly as tense as they were in the first movie, when Voight’s character was a wolf in the middle of a herd of sheep -- you knew it was only a matter of time before he turned the plot on its head. Left to their own devices, the crew in this movie occasionally bickers over petty conflicts and past romances, as if this were “The Real World: Borneo.” And when one character is eventually forced to double-cross the rest of them, it feels contrived beyond belief.
Likewise for this movie, which is a straight-to-video venture if there ever was one. Someone asked me before I saw Anacondas whether the snakes could swim in real life, since they do in both movies, but my knowledge of anacondas -- culled mostly from these two movies -- was too limited to answer the question. Research proved to be futile, because while the Encyclopaedia Britannica will tell me that anacondas are the largest members of the boa constrictor family and that they grow to be as long as 25 feet (which seems awfully short compared to the beasts in these movies), it won’t say what happens when you make an anaconda the star of a bad movie. Then again, maybe the encyclopedia’s editors -- a bunch of really smart chaps, no doubt -- knew that it wasn’t worth the trouble of finding out.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)