The last film I reviewed for this blog was 1995’s godawful sci-fi action schlockfest Congo and, in a striking coincidence, next on the menu is 1997’s Anaconda, which is more or less the same film. Both are products of the late-90s post-Jurassic Park creature feature craze, when every two-bit filmmaker in Tinseltown aimed to make a quick buck by sending hapless humans into exotic locations to be devoured by unconvincingly animated agents of a vengeful and violated Mother Nature. The resulting cultural contributions to the decline of Western civilisation encompassed the laughable man-eating lions of The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), the roving computer-generated giant lizards of straight-to-DVD compost heap Komodo (1998), and the bad-tempered, Briget Fonda-eating SuperCroc of campy slapstick codpiece Lake Placid (1999).
Of course there are differences between these films, but they are largely cosmetic. Anyway, Anaconda transports us to the South American rainforest, and its plot is driven by the ambitions of Jenny from the Block’s scantily clad documentary filmmaker Terri Flores, who sails down the Amazon in the hopes of shooting a mysterious tribe of jungle-dwelling Indians. She is accompanied on this mad and self-centred enterprise by a veritable rogues’ gallery of walking clichés, most of whom die, obviously. But first, the necessary chaos-triggering plot twist is supplied by an encounter with Jon Voight’s fantastically sleazy Paul Serone, a Paraguayan trapper who pretends to be stranded on the banks of the river.
Our crew of credulous heroes unwisely allows this blatant psychopath to come aboard and, in between gorily gutting fish and shooting jungle pigs in the head, he duly convinces them that he can locate the tribe, if they will only let him take command of the ship so that he can steer it down a succession of uncharted and off-grid Amazonian waterways at the dead of night. Everyone agrees to this not-at-all-alarming proposition, and general mayhem soon ensues, because Serone’s goal is not, of course, to help J-Lo and Vanilla Ice make a music video for MTV’s Most Wanted; it’s to capture a big fuck-off Anaconda, preferably alive, and sell it for a million quid, though to who I don’t know, presumably a zoo or a Bond villain.
Anaconda has a bit of a cult following in some quarters, and I can understand why, because it has its fair share of strengths. The basic premise is simple but effective; the jungle setting is compelling; it doesn’t drag; and above all, the performances are mostly competent. J-Lo is good – unexpectedly good, in fact – as the doughty, valiant, and, er, not unappealingly shapely heroine, while noticeable bum notes among the crew of doomed and disposable snakefodder are pleasingly few and far between. Of course, Voight doesn’t so much steal the show as consume it, anaconda-style, by combining the sickly, psychopathic sleaze of Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor with the obsessional monster-hunting PTSD of Jaws’ Quint. Nonetheless, J-Lo’s post-Christian Human Rights-spreading brand of colonialism turns out to be more than a match for Serone’s naked neoliberal interest in pillaging the unspoiled landscape of the Global South for personal gain.
But although a lot of the stuff in front of the camera works well, the problems behind it prove pernicious indeed. The special effects are not as breath-takingly laughable as Congo‘s, but they’re not all that convincing either; the giant snake is sometimes computer generated, sometimes made of what looks to be poor quality rubber, but it’s always unintimidating and not exactly seamlessly embedded in its environment. In 1975, Spielberg achieved something authentically terrifying with a low-budget, broken down mechanical shark, so why couldn’t they pull off something slightly more credible than this 32-bit end-of-level boss over 20 years later?
The mention of Spielberg brings us to the real problem with this film because, just as Congo was skippered and subsequently skuttled by no-name hack Frank Marshall, Anaconda was inexplicably entrusted to Luis Llosa, whose credits comprised Sniper (1993) and The Specialist (1994), neither of which I’ve seen, and neither of which I care to after this. In the hands of a gifted or even competent director, this well-conceived, well-acted story could have been a tense postcolonial horror, or at least a Tomb Raider-style tropical action romp. But instead, Llosa goes with the spirit of the times, and serves up a late-90s comic book crapfest that is more redolent of cartoonish horror comedies like Eight Legged Freaks or Deep Blue Sea than Jaws. Tellingly, he never made another film after this, but that must have been cold comfort to J-Lo and her asphyxiated companions, who had long since been sold down the river.
Rating: * *