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! Okay, I am a horror writer, after all.)
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 CGI 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 log line: “If 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.
SWORDS AND SPECTERS: I’m in the middle of something that I find interesting—and rather weird. Later this year I plan on revising and reissuing one of my earliest sword & sorcery novels, titled Berbora, which I’m currently reading. I wrote it well over thirty years ago, and wrote many other books between then and now, so I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that—I don’t remember a freaking thing about it. (Should I play the age card here?) I’m not kidding; not characters, not storyline, nada. Well, I suppose that will keep me objective when I undertake the tons of revisions that it needs. Still…
The second book in my Ro-lan adventure fantasy series, The Shrouded Walls of Kharith, is up on Amazon Kindle. A paperback version will be available in two weeks or less for those of us who still like to hold real
books in our hands. Also, two of my horror novels, both originally published by Bantam, will be free for downloading on Kindle, likely for the final time—The Modoc Well (on Friday and Saturday, 7/6 and 7/7) and Demon Shadows (on Sunday, 7/8.) Enjoy!
That question about your film preference was rhetorical, right? 😉
I think your memory lapse has less to do with age and more to do with the many characters, stories and facts stashed in your mental file cabinet. Have a happy 4th!
Good point! I have the population of a small Third World country wandering around in the old brain, so I guess forgetting one or two (or ten or twenty) characters from three decades ago is not a sign of early-onset dementia. 🙂
And yeah, I make no excuses for my film preferences. I just enjoy ’em.
Forgetting characters and scenes you wrote 30 years ago isn’t so different from the high school friends who have drifted off your radar screen and whose names you can’t quite recall anymore. The upside is that, as Norman Thayer said of re-reading “Treasure Island” in the movie “On Golden Pond”: “my mind is going, so it’ll all be new to me.”
And it’s certainly not an issue of age. When I wrote my first novel, the publisher wanted to change the name (of course) from my pedestrian working title “The Cabin” to “Howl of a Thousand Winds.” I told him I liked it, and asked where he got the title.
“You should know,” he said after a pause. “You wrote it.”
Turns out it was a line of dialogue between the reporter protagonist and the Blackfoot medicine man, who was describing the sound made by the malevolent spirit that was killing people in the snowstorms. I’d only written it a few months before, but had already forgotten.
Enjoy rediscovering your characters. Unlike those forgotten friends, our characters in books don’t age, don’t change, and don’t let us down by evolving into someone unrecognizable with the years.
Great thoughts, Morris. You made my day. Weird as it seems, I’m having a ball “renewing relationships” with the numerous characters that populate my old novel. And I have many more books to go.
Have a great Fourth!
Hey Mike,
I would proffer a guess that your film preferences were molded, at least in part, by the movies available when you were a child. (After all, you’ve admitted to your literary influences from those days, right?) Back then, fear of radiation poisoning made everything grow to outlandish sizes on the movie screen. In so many cases, “science fiction” was merely a case of taking something familiar and changing it in a weird or creepy way. It was a while before SF truly took off into completely unexplored territory, at least in the more popular media.
I have to admit that Anaconda is practically Oscar material compared to the spun-off crap that pollutes Saturday night television on SyFy these days. There is just no redeeming that mess. I’m more concerned what it says about how they view the audience…and why the audience today actually watches that stuff.
And if you liked the snake, the 40′ animatronic anaconda was on display in San Francisco at the California Academy of Science when my husband and I went to see the reptile exhibit a few months ago. It was truly cool, and so were the real-life inspirations for such fears. Of course, I’m generally not afraid of snakes myself, but that one has the potential to change my mind!
I concur on the suggested reasons for having forgotten one of your books so thoroughly. I truly wish I had the same excuse of ‘overpopulation’.
Actually, Kate, as an younger adult I’d never gotten above 3′ 8″, but a visit to White Sands in New Mexico saw me grow over two feet. 🙂
The animatronic snake is on display!? I have a new must-see on my next Bay Area visit! A shrine, to be sure.
Hi Mike –
Your blog about Anaconda and other big monster films reminds me of the old iconic Ray Harryhausen movies – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and many others. You remember those, right? Gotta love the old special effects technology. I remember watching those as a kid and being spellbound. These days I’ll take a B movie (especially if it has a big monster!) over any super slick special effects, megastar acting, blockbuster ANY DAY!
Dueling skeletons and such! Medusa and her snake-head! Loved that old stop-action stuff. I never get tired of watching these oldies. Thanks, Karen.