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+