Entertainment :: Movies
Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid by David Foucher
EDGE PublisherFriday Aug 27, 2004 They should have left the snakes in peace. Like sharks, snakes have no over evil intention towards humans or anyone else who comes crashing through their home turf in search of a red flower which would appear to prolong life – and I would wager if they had larger brains they would think the whole concept as ridiculous as I do. I supported their systematic munching of this group of materialistic morons in the same way I supported the one snake decimating the unlucky film crew who rescue Jon Voight in the original 1997 film. But this time we have no capable actors (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz make this new lot seem like Shakespearian auteurs), and unlike “Jaws”, no visionary director to provide a shred of noble decency to nature’s denizens.
However, the CGI effects do provide a few exceptional moments of fright. And how often can one say in this new cinematic world of computer-generated reality that the CGI effects were the best part of the experience?
Johnny Messner, Matthew Marsden, Morris Chestnut, Salli Richardson, and Eugene Byrd comprise our hapless group of adventurers, this time attempting to reach the Blood Orchid – a flower that apparently grows on one ten-foot square bush in one location on the planet and blooms once every seven years: who comes up with this crap? Unfortunately, the orchid has also made the indigenous anacondas oversized… and there are a lot of them… and it’s mating season, so they’re unnaturally vicious in their apparent horniness. The players in this farce are interchangeable – each one a worse actor than the last, their characters based so thoroughly on horror/suspense caricatures that if they turned a corner and were fighting aliens or tigers or the daunting prospect of manipulating a remote control they probably wouldn’t lose what audience attention they sacrificed in the elongated, badly written opening sequences.
It’s not long before their boat sinks and the snakes start chomping (and then puking up so they can munch again, a fact which should NOT have surprised these unfortunate souls – didn’t they see the original?) And the audience, having forked over $10 for this serpentine mess, begins cheering on the anacondas as they pick off the Emerson admissions rejects.
In the studio’s literature on this film, you might joyfully encounter this description of these events: “But when a group of scientists finds the sacred flower, they encounter an evil they never imagined, and realize they may never leave the jungle again.” Don’t you just love it? Human beings, motivated consequentially by pure greed and inconsequentially by petty bickering and lust, go charging into the forest with nothing more than a rotting boat, a few flashlights and a laptop, discover their position on the food chain sits tragically below big ol’ snakes… and it’s the SNAKES that are evil.
Well, don’t let their cousins in the Hollywood food chain slither into your wallet and sink their fangs into a ten-spot. Recoil, dear reader, and go see a film that DOESN’T have its head up its Asp.
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