Well, I figured it might be amusing to compare the OG Anaconda with the recent meta-remake version. And then lob in our review of the Chinese version – I still don’t know whether or not that was an official adaptation or a remake. But either way, that review has been one of our most popular pages. Since we started tracking numbers in late August, the Chinese Anaconda review has been visited almost ten thousand times, a number surpassed by only one other article. So who am I to spurn a chance to get it some more traffic?
I was going to add some more snake films, but Anaconda: Blood Coil sapped me of the will to live do so. First, it was the full three minutes of slowly scrolling text, with a voiceover, regarding Anacondas and their habits. That took out Chris, who headed for pillowy softness instead. Then there was the even longer sequence of Blair Witch-styled whimpering which followed. Finally, the scene which didn’t just seem as if it had been filmed on an iPhone 6, it also looked as if it was lit with an iPhone 6. That broke me, and I opted to follow Chris. It’s very, very rare for me to bail on a film once I start. But this almost felt refreshing. Maybe, as I get nearer the grave, I’m going to realize life is too precious for truly shitty movies like Anaconda: Blood Coil. Anyway: avoid.
However, I did get a chance to go back and look at one of the giant snake films which predate J-Lo and J-Vo going up the Amazon: perhaps the first. Because its title is not Anaconda, I didn’t feel it quite fitted in here. But for those seeking additional snake related content, you can find my review of Spasms here, and learn which is more dangerous: an oversized taipan or eighties Oliver Reed. Otherwise, please enjoy the all-you-can-eat Anaconda buffet below.
Anaconda (1997)
Rating: C+
Dir: Luis Llosa.
Star: Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Ice Cube.
This certainly wasn’t the first film with a giant snake. It probably wasn’t even the first to feature it as the main antagonist. That would likely be Spasms, from 1983, starring Oliver Reed. [Weirdly the second film in the early eighties featuring Reed and killer snakes, coming after Venom] But there’s no doubt, this set the genre as we know it in motion, containing most of the basic elements still getting recycled today, almost thirty years later. Disposable characters, wandering into the wilderness for which they are ill-equipped, and finding themselves in a battle for their lives. Munching ensues. What else do you need?
The opening caption states that anacondas “will regurgitate their prey in order to kill and eat again.” Congratulation, movie. You just set a new record for Fastest Fact-check of a Movie, at forty seconds. Film Blitz analysts rate this claim as False, and that sets the tone for the biological accuracy of what is to follow. We also get a new possible record for Fastest Danny Trejo Death, at four minutes and twenty-eight seconds, before we reach the main cast. They’re a film crew, heading into the Amazon to search for a lost tribe, under director Terry Flores (Lopez). To this end, they hire guide Paul Serone (the not very Paraguayan Voight, who looks like someone cosplaying as Tony Montana), except he has another agenda: capturing his white whale, the gigantic snake of the title.
It’s a great cast, also including Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer and Jonathan Hyde. Wilson, as sound recordist Gary Dixon, gets the great line: “Is it just me, or does the jungle make you really, really horny?” Anyone familiar with horror movies, will know he just signed his own death warrant. The main difference to subsequent films is perhaps the restraint this shows. While many of the Chinese Animal Attack films lure people in with immediate and explicit snake action, there aren’t any oversized reptiles on screen here until almost the half-way point. Until then – indeed, for some period after – it feels as if Serone might be a bigger threat.
It also begins the time-honoured tradition of snakes that growl: its sounds were provided by Frank Welker, who also gave voice to the Gremlins. In my original review, I was scathing about the CGI. While that certainly hasn’t aged well – most obviously, the scene at the waterfall – I do respect the efforts to create a pair of life-sized animatronic creatures as well. The larger one reportedly contained over 40 miles of wiring, needed to handle the sixty, individually controllable vertebrae. These practical elements have stood the test of time considerably better.
Although it may have seemed original at the time, it now has the comfortable familiarity of an old sweater. Though I doubt there’s been anything quite like the POV shot from deep inside the anaconda’s mouth, as it swallows one of the characters. It looks like he’s walking into the Lincoln Tunnel. It does appear the snakes exist on a diet of white men (with an occasional side-dish of Hispanic ones, for that spicy sabor). Nowadays, this would probably be done as some kind of socially-aware commentary: here, it feels mercifully free of any such considerations. Instead, nobody here cares, and this is just a straightforward, if quite basic and only intermittently successful, monster movie.
[Original review] In five years time, this could probably have been a great picture. The somewhat twisted grammar of that sentence is largely explained by the knowledge that its biggest flaw is the computer graphics snake, which ranges from the acceptable to the laughable; some things are still better off done with latex and pneumatics. That’s a shame, as the rest of the film isn’t anywhere near as bad, being cheerful and lively with Voight memorably snaky himself, playing a hunter who hijacks a documentary film crew and their boat up the Amazon.
Danny Trejo and Stoltz (unconscious for most of the movie) are severely underused, leaving the field clear for the rest of the tiny cast, notably Lopez and Jonathan Hyde. There’s an occasional nod to Werner Herzog, and the snake attacks are great set-pieces, well written and directed with pace and vigour, if not perhaps great herpetological accuracy. Just a pity the monster’s bark is far better than its byte. C+
Anaconda (2024)
Rating: B
Dir: Qiuliang Xiang, Hesheng Xiang
Star: Terence Yin, Ruoyan Xia, Xingchen Wang, Paul Che
a.k.a. Hundred Poisons Rampage
Tip of the hat to Adrian over at Movies and Mania, for pointing me in the direction of this one. I wouldn’t have found it, considering the YouTube title was, and I quote: “【动作惊险】《百毒狂袭》热带雨林里巨蛇吞噬众人，男人竟用船只野钓巨蟒背水一战!” Might have missed that, even if Google Translate tells me it means, “[Thrilling action] ‘Poisonous Attack’ In the tropical rain forest, a giant snake devours everyone, and a man actually uses a boat to catch the giant python in a desperate fight!” No IMDb entry, the opening and end credits are removed, and I only know the Chinese language title because the thumbnail on the video is a heavily cropped copy of the original poster.
I’m going with the “official” English language one, despite likely (and probably deliberate) confusion with the Jon Voight/Jennifer Lopez movie, one of the OGs of the snake attack genre. Though the Chinese name here is inaccurate, because as any herpetologist would tell you, the anacondas at the centre here aren’t poisonous, constricting their prey to death. And, boy, do they constrict. In contrast to most When Chinese Animal Attack movies, the deaths here are not quick. They’re considerably more crunchy, involving coiling, squeezing, being eaten (there’s one glorious shot of a snake slithering away, with an obviously human-shaped lump visible through its skin) and – another parallel to Anaconda – occasional regurgitation. It’s probably the most brutal WCAA film I’ve seen.
The tone is set right from the start, where Jeff (Yin) kills then decapitates his jungle guide for trying to renegotiate terms. He is obsessed with capturing the Crimson Anaconda (which I informed Chris, will be how I refer to my penis in future. That whirring sound you hear are her eyes rolling), in a way which has echoes of Moby Dick, crossed with Aguirre. But round one goes to the snake, leaving Jeff stranded deep in the wilderness. Meanwhile, a motley band of circus performers are on their way up-river to a gig of dubious provenance. They end up encountering Jeff, but losing their boat, meaning his vessel – two days’ hike away through the jungle – is the only way out. But can they trust him?
You won’t be hard-pushed to figure out the answer to that question. But we’re not here for intrigue. What we are here for, are some surprisingly good effects. Outside of a couple of ropey shots, most of this is convincing, helped by the use of genuine (albeit normal-sized) snakes. For example, when they blow up a river obstruction, the resulting reptile rain is largely real. The Crimson Anaconda, while large, is not ridiculously so, and although the characters are quickly sketched, each has enough quirks to make you care as they slowly get the life crushed out of them. Well, at least care somewhat, and that’s better than most WCAA films. It also lacks dumb “missing father” plots, being almost straight jungle survival. It all combines to make this one of the best I’ve seen so far.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.
Anaconda (2025)
Rating: C-
Dir: Tom Gormican.
Star: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton.
It’s kinda sad that the Chinese, straight to streaming remake, was clearly more enjoyable than this. Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script seems too interested in tying itself in meta-knots. For being a remake is not enough: this is instead about a group of film-makers who go to the Amazon to remake the original movie. There’s writer-director Doug McCallister (Black, basically playing Jack Black. Again), who used to make films with childhood friend Ronald Griffen (Rudd) , now a background actor. When they reunite, the project is hatched, dragging in lead actress Claire Simonsand (Newton) and cinematographer with a substance abuse problem, Kenny Trent (Zahn). They quickly end up on a boat going up the Amazon, pursued by gold smugglers, personal issues and, occasionally, a large reptile.
There’s a number of interesting ways this approach might have gone. If I’d been making it, I’d have gone with turning Doug and Ronald into Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, destroying each other and everything around them, for the sake of their art. Instead, we get pee jokes and so little sense of threat, the one time a major character is seriously threatened, it’s not at all convincing. At least the original kills off multiple actors of whom you’d heard. Nor, incidentally, is Queensland a convincing stand-in for the Amazon. I’ve seen Aguirre, Wrath of God and Burden of Dreams. Ain’t nobody dragging no ship over any mountain here. Ain’t nobody constructing an animatronic snake with forty miles of wiring either.
That applies both to the film, and the film within the film. They can’t afford a giant snake, so hire a local with a reasonably sized one, until an unfortunate (and amusing) accident puts an end to that. Like the original, the real monster doesn’t show up until later. The problem here is, what fills the time is not very interesting. The meta-film, called The Anaconda, is fairly bad, but we never see enough of it to make much difference. Instead, there’s bickering between Doug and Ronald, a boat driver with a dark secret, and sexual tension between Ronald and Claire, which is about as unconvincing as the meta-snake. Though I did actually like Newton, since she gives Claire an authenticity, missing from the other characters.
The Gormican-Etten pairing previously gave us the similarly-meta The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with Nicolas Cage. Had I known that, I would perhaps have skipped it entirely, since Hollywood navel-gazing is of precious little interest to me. If this had genuinely been an attempt to remake the original on a budget of forty-three thousand dollars (along the lines of another Black vehicle, the heavily flawed Be Kind Rewind), I’d have been down for that. Though the luxurious river boat on which they set sail would have cost more than that, all by itself. Instead, this cost $45 million – the same as the original, admittedly unadjusted for inflation. There are a couple of amusing cameos, mostly based on the idea of a rival, big-budget remake proceeding simultaneously. But this angle isn’t developed into much more than an excuse for some gratuitous pyrotechnics.
I couldn’t honestly bring myself to tag this in the horror category, because it is almost ruthlessly scrubbed of all elements which might generate fear. It’s largely a comedy, and one whose success will depend heavily on your tolerance for Jack Black doing Jack Black things [the contrast to his driven, wilderness film-maker in King Kong couldn’t be greater]. It’s a schtick for which my patience is increasingly limited, and the rest of the cast here don’t do enough – or get enough chances – to counterbalance it. They may mock Jon Voight’s accent, and rightfully so. But that was still more amusing than the majority of this.