Anaconda DVD > Reviews > Anaconda...Hmmm Tastes Like Turkey

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very weak
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Weak
Soundtrack	Unmemorable

Advantages:	see review
Disadvantages:	see review

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I suppose you would have to say that a movie like Anaconda didn't really have that much chance of being too much of a success. A rather large man-eating snake isn't exactly the most fearsome of movie monsters and it would no doubt have taken a director and cast of some talent to make it even come close to working. Anaconda doesn't have these and as a result it does exactly what I feared it would...it sucks, and it sucks big time.

The plot...well what there is of it. Hollywood seems intent on treating the fans of action movies like idiots and this plot is yet another example of that. Anaconda features a film crew making a documentary in the Amazon jungle with an anthrapologist. All well and good except that this film crew seems to come from the Disney studio and behaves like they are a bunch of looney toons characters. Ignore this though if you can and you find that they have stumbled across a stranded poacher/big game hunter/ermm whatever he is in the middle of the jungle in the form of John Voight. He lures them into the lair of a 40ft Anaconda with the intention of catching it so that he can make the big bucks from returning it home - maybe he intends to carry it on his back? Well forget that - capture is his plan. Of course the snake wants none of this and goes about systematically exterminating the wooden characters one by one...except those who had some kind of character development early on because there have to survive - its in the rules.

Thats the plot, and I make it sound better than it is. You do not get to see the overacting of Voight, the woodeness of Lopez and the others, who disappear into the background quite soon after they are introduced and have SNAKE FOOD emblazoned upon their foreheads within the first ten minutes. You get to miss the hamfisted attempts at humour which would have a 5 year old rolling their eyes at how juvenile and misplaced it is and you will hopefully get to miss out on sitting through this heap of trash if you pay any attention whatsoever to this review. Lets hope you do.

Anaconda is basically another movie which tries to be a Jaws clone, but doesn't try hard enough. We have done sharks, alligators, pirhana fish...just about everything else on the planet so it is obviously time that we added a large killer snake into the melange. THE WORLD NEEDS IT!! Well the world could have easily have done without Anaconda and lets hope most continue to do so. The main problem is in that there is nothing particularly scary about a big snake. Take this fact and then add to it that the director seems to not understand that the main idea behind a thriller is to offer the occassional 'thrill'(hence the name duh!) and you have an enormous problem before you even begin to look at anything else. I think that I could count the exciting moments on one hand and that these take so long to occur is criminal - try to stay awake for them if you can, but there ain't much to get excited over. You watch, you see, you hear(unfortunately) and people die and you couldn't give a damn because the characters are developed no further than name, job and screwing who. Tough to care about someone you know nothing about and tougher stil to be frightened of a monster which is so mean and evil that it can be killed with a shotgun. Of course it could be killed a lot quicker by pulling the plug on the computer which is being used to create the snake images. CGI effects only work when you can not tell that they are CGI effects - here it is blatantly obvious that you are watching a computer animation half the time and it crushes the scenes in which it occurs. The animatronics snake is better, but by then its too late...

So...weak monster, weak effects, weak character, weak script, weak action sequences...weak just about everything so surely this movie offers no fun whatsoever? Well there is one thing you can do briefly and that is to play spot the Jaws rip-offs...I'll give you a head start. Lopez is Roy Schneider(but with better legs), Stoltz is Richard Dreyfuss and Voight is Robert Shaw...now you can play from there, plenty to find believe me...

Anaconda is quite simply rubbish. A thriller without thrills is a thriller failed and this movie fails in style. Cruise on by this title at your video store and go paint the fence or something should it come on terrestrial televison - it has to be more fun than this.