Anaconda, le prédateur

I read a lot of the review on this 23 year old flick. It's not as bad as people are saying. It is a well made finely acted unbelievable adventure flick. Anyone that expected this to be an Oscar award winning movie are delusional. I mean really, it's Jay Lo, Ice Cube , Voight, and Owen. It's mindless entertainment and nothing else. Enjoy.

This stirring picture concerns about a documentary film crew from National Geographic constituted by a motley group: Jennifer Lopez Ice Cube, Eric Stolz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer traveling the Amazon river looking for a legendary Indian tribe and guided by Jon Voigh, playing a nutty, snake-obsessed hunter.But a great creature terrorizing the river, it turns to be a very large Anaconda with more 50-foot long. Meanwhile the bunch relationship each other till appearance the enormous snake. A poisonous and giant snake,attack at random and slither down the river, forest, jungle and slither around the boat ready to attack anyone on its path.

The picture provides stirring and exciting amusement with hair-raising chills and creepy scares. The Anacandas, themselves , of course, are the real star stars and they are astounding terrifyingly and almost totally convincing.The snakes are made by animatronics and computer generator, as usual. Middling performances though the players reacting appropriately to becoming snake food. Rather sympathetic and exaggerated acting by Jon Voight as crazy and nasty snakes hunter. The picture displays atmospheric music score by Randy Edelman and colorful cinematography by Bill Butler, cameraman of ¨Jaws¨film. The movie is professionally directed by Luis Llosa, an expert action movies director (The sniper, The specialist) and habitual shooting on river Amazonas(Fire on the Amazon, eight hundred leagues down the Amazon). It's followed by inferior sequel : The hunt for the blood orchid(2004) by Dwight H. Little and created an authentic exploitation snakes sub-genre, such as : ¨Python I and II, Boa, Rattler, King Cobra , among others.

This is not as bad as some people say it is. Generally, it's pretty formulaic, but there are a few alterations on the monster movie format.

A crew making a documentary set sail down a tropical river, on their way losing their fuel and, you guessed it, bumping into a big snake. There are all the usual characters here: beautiful girl, villain, posh English bloke (there's always one!), working-class hero, etc. They gradually get picked off one-by-one - although guessing the next "victim" is so easy, it takes the fun out of it all.

There are a few oddities in the consistency of the plot. Most of the killing happen in the second half of the film with the first half devoted to boring sub-plots. Curiously, the customary "introduction shock" is not a snake death, but a suicide. We never really find out why this has happened - after all, there is still a lot of Jennifer Lopez to be shown - and this, I think, is one of the main problems with the film. Story lines are attempted but never completed and so the audience will never gain true satisfaction from the film.

Another interesting factor is Terri's boyfriend and his contribution to the story line. During a dive, he gets bitten and the crew manage to recover him. They save his life but he is still unconscious and remains so throughout most of the movie.

However, the weakest character of all is the snake. Sure, it's pretty ugly, but it will never be truly terrifying as the director doesn't play on our sense of fear. We may be surprised when the snake attacks but never truly shocked.

As I said before, this isn't too bad a movie (I've seen worse) - there are some moments of tension, the actors do their jobs and the special effects are far from laughable. You might want to watch this if it's shown of TV, but I wouldn't pay money to see it.

It's a stupid B-Movie with enough quality to fly by, and enough camp charm to get away with such cinematic crimes. The cast play it straight, apart from Voight. I'm pretty sure he was drunk during the shooting, coming out with an inexplicable accent and a look reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter. It's ridiculous fun, with hokey CGI and animatronics. The animatronics are great and make me miss the 90s. It's a big snake shaped tube and goes from slow robotic motions, to super fast CGI. Cube and Hyde manage some, at times, adorable dialogue. Voight's presence also unites the rest of the cast, and each character gets their own heroic captain moment. Fun filled and just plain bad. I loved it.

Let me tell you about a little film called Anaconda.

I watched this film a dozen times as a kid, I loved monster flicks. Anaconda was bad, it was utterly bad, yet I've seen it more times than I want to admit. Now we visit it again, years later, so we can laugh at how ridiculous this film is.

We open with Danny Trejo, for some reason they dubbed his lines. He doesn't speak English, but the voice the use is so much higher than what we all know to be the gravel voice of Trejo. Just something that I found funny.

The monster effects are laughably bad at times and worse at others. When the snake is animatronic, the obviousness of it all makes it seems like a bad ride at universal. Then we have the CGI effects, which make the snake seem like it doesn't even belong on the screen. The first attack on a human, the entire thing looks like one giant blur. The first time we see the snake in general isn't with some Jaws like reveal, it's simply the thing slithering around in the jungle before it attacks a puma. No big reveal, no slow reveal...just the damn snake out in the open.

In Ebert's review of the film, which is enthusiastically gave a thumbs up, he claims Jon Voight delivers a brave and slimy performance. That I can agree with, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a great performance. It's without a doubt, memorable, but in the campy way. He glares at almost everyone on the screen, his skin is slimy like a snake and immediately untrustworthy. No one else seems to think they are in a bad movie here. Voight seems to know this from the get go. Watch this film and then watch The Room and tell me the performances from them are not almost identical. Is he doing DeNiro? Is he doing Brando? Who the hell knows. It's one wacky performance, that much is a guarantee.

This was one of the early Jennifer Lopez films that probably helped launch her career. Why? I don't know, she doesn't offer anything interesting here. Ice Cube and Owen Wilson play against their usual type, I don't think we've seen either of them in a monster flick since this one,

Suffice to say, Anaconda is a bad film that boarders on being highly enjoyable. Sit back, laugh and enjoy the absurdity of Anaconda. If you take this film seriously...at all, even for one second, then you will utterly hate it.