For whatever reason, lots of people have viewed this 2012 post about a film depicting a deadly giant snake. Not sure why, but what the hey…
I gotta say, when it comes to guilty-pleasure horror movies I’m a sucker for anything BIG. Give me giant arachnids, rats, bugs of any kind, reptiles, dogs, cats, lions, tigers, and bears—even Fifty-Foot Women or Amazing Colossal Men—and I’m as happy as a clam. (Good grief, what does that say about me!)
Which brings us to Anaconda, a 1997 film that did quite well for its producers and investors. (“Snakes,” a renowned archaeologist once said, “why’d it have to be snakes?”) An acknowledged “B” movie that cost $45 million to make, its worldwide return was three times that. Its cast was atypical of a film like this. Try Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and one of my favorite actors, Jon Voight. What!? These people performed in a giant snake movie with a forty-foot cheesy reptile? Yeah, and unlike other gems such as Eight Legged Freaks, this one was not played for laughs. In some ways, that made it rather humorous—perhaps the reason why I still get a kick out of it.
Lopez plays a documentary film director headed up the Amazon to find a lost tribe. Along the way they pick up a stranded guy named Paul Serone—played by Voight at his icky-creepy best. If you visualize him in his older years as the nerdy Patrick Gates in the National Treasure movies, think again. He wears this unnerving sneer on his face throughout the film, both before and after they figure out he’s evil. Serone is obsessed with trapping a giant anaconda, and if some of the film crew have to become snake bait, then so be it.
Some of the dialogue is unintentionally—or maybe intentionally—funny. For example, Owen Wilson is hot after this young woman on the film crew. (Kari Wuhrer, one of my “B” movie favorites; again, see Eight Legged Freaks.) Early on he says to her, “Is it just me, or does the jungle make you really, really horny?” Great pickup line. Later, the documentary narrator (Jonathan Hyde) says, in his snobby British voice, “Last time I was in water like this, I was up all night picking leeches off my scrotum.”
But it’s Voight who steals the show as sinister Serone with lines such as, “This river can kill you in a thousand ways,” and, when discussing snakes, “They strike, wrap around you, hold you tighter than your true love. And you get the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode.” This is great stuff here! (The latter dialogue probably accounts for the film’s tagline: “When you can’t breathe, you can’t scream.”)
Anyway, as with most films of this genre, some will live (the ones that you’d prefer to), most will die (a body count of the primarily obnoxious), with the villain (Serone, not the snake; that beastie is only foraging for food) suffering a fitting demise that will have viewers cheering in the aisles—or something like that.
Anaconda did spawn a number of sequels—but don’t waste your time. For fans of the genre, watching the first one is a fun and mindless way to spend eighty-nine minutes. The jungle scenery alone is cool. For non-fans, it’s still a kick to see Lopez, Wilson, and Cube in one of the earliest screen roles for each. And Voight’s über-creepy snake hunter—that is definitely worth the price of admission.