Jon Voight. Sean Connery. Robert DeNiro. Dustin Hoffman. Kathleen Turner. Arnold Schwarzennegar. What do all of these people have in common? They're critically acclaimed and successful actors who, for some reason at the height of their success, decided to step out of their niche into a "different" role and movie genre in the hopes of showing their range. But instead of pleasantly surprising everyone the way John Travolta did when he starred in "Pulp Fiction," they wound up shocking the audiences and getting egg on their faces. A lot of it. And not the tolerable kind, but the really yucky, runny, undercooked, yellowy, messy, dribbly kind that makes you want to upchuck the moment you see it.

Anaconda is Jon Voight's "Hook," his "Baby Geniuses," his "Avengers." This was the one bad movie that he had no business being in, but probably decided to become a part of to prove to everyone that he could do a film like this. But it was a bad move. I don't care what Roger Ebert says-- this movie was fartingly bad. Hell, I'll confront the chubby, li'l guy myself and ask him what he was smoking when he gave it such a glowing review!

Okay, where do I start in picking apart this monstrosity? The image this movie immediately conjures up is this hilarious moment from one of The Simpsons' "Halloween Specials," the one where everyone lives in a Totalitarian society run by Ned Flanders. In this one scene, Moe-- who's just gotten a pre-frontal lobotomy-- tells Homer, "If you're good, they let you keep what they take out." Then he holds up his own personal jar of brain and coos at the little bit of grey matter gently floating in the formaldehyde as if it were a baby. This is exactly the type of mentality needed to appreciate this film. It is DUH Central. Every plot twist, everything that the characters do will either be predictable or have you going, "Huh? That's just plain stoooopid!" or "Give me a break! That could never happen!" That's a very bad sign for a movie, guys, especially when you're saying all this in the first five minutes!

Take, for instance, the circumstances in which Paul Sarone (Voight), the film's baddie, is met. Long story short: the main characters (Lopez, Stoltz, Wuhrer, Wilson, Ice Cube, Hyde) are a film crew out in the middle of the Amazon doing a documentary on a little known Amazonian tribe. A day or two into their shoot, it flash floods; as they float down the Amazon in torrential rain, Sarone is discovered stranded in a tree, crying out for help in English. This would not be so shocking if it weren't for the fact that we learn shortly afterwards that Sarone is a native of Latin America! Huh? A guy is a native of Latin America and doesn't cry out in his native tongue to a bunch of strangers? Yeah, okay. Why wouldn't he cry out in Spanish? DUH!

Other DUH moments-- who knew snakes screamed like Godzilla? The freakishly large anaconda in this movie, who becomes the mission of Sarone to catch, does! But then again, I would too if I was the star of this film. When the snake screeches in this picture, he's not doing it because he's a mean bad-@ss trying to scare everyone; he's doing it cuz he's saying, "Get my agent!"

Dear God-- and don't even get me started on how this film rips off every suspense thriller that's ever been made. In fact, let me give you the entire plot synopsis of Anaconda, not in terms of its plot line, but in terms of its stolen material. The movie starts out with the last scene from Jaws, where Roy Scheider's clinging to the mast of a ship as Jaws is circling him in the water. Then it moves into "Apocalypse Now," minus the good script, Academy Award acting, or that cool Doors music. Then it twists into Dead Calm, shimmies into Cape Fear, and macarenas into Alien territory, right down to the shot for shot sequence of the unwitting victim meeting the deadly anaconda snake face to face. Then it enters Tremors world, and finally into the slasher genre, as nothing can kill this damned snake. You can beat it, kick it, scream at it, slam it, burn it, punch it, jump on it, trounce on it, shoot it, slap it, sing N* Sync to it, and the darned thing still won't die! What is it-- a cousin twice removed of Mike Meyers and Freddie Kruger? C'mon! Gotta hand it to the director, though-- he's not just any hack-- he hacks movies that people have actually seen! Good for him!

The acting? You call that acting? For one, Voight walks around with a scrunched up expression looking like someone just tooted; and that accent just slips way too easily and frequently into Ricky Ricardo-land for it to be believable. ("Leetle snakes"? "Bah-bee Burd"? C'mon-- I was half ready to hear him say, "Loo-thee, I'm home!") Sad to say that as bad as he was, he and the other older actors (Hyde, Trejo) were the best things in the movie, next to Stoltz's riveting performance. (FYI: Stoltz only acts in the first third of the movie; the last two thirds his character literally lies in a coma for the rest of the film.)

Oh, yeah-- and the special effects. Hah. I've seen better special effects when I close my eyes and rub my eyelids real hard. I got confused by the computer graphics in this film. Isn't CG supposed to look good? What the hell happened? Did they use Microsoft Paint rendering the snake? Well, at least you didn't see a zipper going up the snake's belly in that scene where we see one of the character's body protruding from its stomach as it swims away! At least I thought it didn't. (Didn't it?) And, yeah, great sequence in the beginning of the film where footage of a real black panther is spliced in with footage of an obviously fake stuffed panther being taken down by the anaconda. It was seamless. Not. But thanks for trying.

But enough of my understated dislike of this film. Where to put Anaconda on a scale of Sucktitude? That's not very hard. I mean, I could have given it a little slack for attempting to be a B film. But this movie is so bad, it doesn't even work as camp. So on a scale of 1 being "Showgirls" bad and 10 being "Battlefield Earth" atrociousness, I'd put it at an eleven, which translates into a 1 in Epinions Land. Spank you very much. You may go now.



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older