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Anaconda (1997) Putting the admittedly ludicrous Congo to shame, Anaconda is the most ridiculous jungle adventure since James Whale's delirious Green Hell of 1940. Obviously conceived as the herpetophobe version of Jaws, though its forty-foot monster with a plastic head and CGI coils is constantly upstaged by a scar-faced and 'Paraguayan'-accented Jon Voigt, this stirs its wok of cliche with elements from precedents as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and The African Queen, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Aguirre Wrath of God. The cast is an immaculate cross-section of born losers: a back-from-career-death villain who has realised that it's impossible in such circumstances to overract enough but still gives it the old college try (Voight); heroes who need to get out of ethnic typecasting into a mainstream commercial movie and glumly trudge through the terror (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube); a whitebread scientific stooge who spends most of the film mutely sick below-decks and doubtless feels he's made enough high integrity low-payday indie efforts to make up for the fat fees he can win here for very little effort (Eric Stoltz); and a secondary babe-victim who has already been in Thinner this year and therefore knows this won't be the silliest film on her resumé (Kari Wuhrer). Add an English-accented arrogant twit who cops most of the funny lines (Jonathan Hyde) and a few snarling, sinister, greasy locals (Vincent Castellanos, Danny Trejo) to prove that ethnic stereotype is still a viable form of narrative short-cut, and you have snake-food to go in jumbo portions. Our merry bunch of sweaty fools - Wuhrer's jungle wear is especially fetching and impractical - brave the usual hazards of such ill-advised ethnological ventures ('the last time I was in water like this I spent the night picking leeches off my scrotum,' whines Westridge) but also have to handle a plot which continually plays variations on several characters trying to knock one another out ('arse-hole in one,' snaps Westridge as he brains Sarone with a golf club) or being constricted and chomped to death. The horror movie tactics are pretty threadbare: low-angle, water's edge tracking shots towards hapless victims; a sinister totem pole to suggest that the monster is feared as a God in these parts; a monster and a villain who continually come back from deaths (Sarone even returns after ingestion as the snake sicks him up so that, covered in digestive goo, he can have a last sinister wink); incidental gruesomenesses featuring jungle fauna (we only hear about the fish that swims up the urethra and has to be cut out); a music score that works overtime to drown out the absurd dialogue. Luis Llosa, who almost managed this level of hilarity with The
Specialist, clearly didn't set out to make something as entertainingly
camp as Anaconda rather wonderfully manages to be,
but the touch for suspense displayed in Sniper seems to have deserted
him. Though Voigt snarls his way through the regulation speech about
the fearsomeness of his opponent - 'the perfect killing machine ...
it holds you tighter than your true love, and you get the privilege
of hear your bones break before the power of their embrace causes your
veins to explode' - the snake itself is seen too early and too often
to be that frightening, and in the end turns out to be two monsters,
a green one fairly easily dispatched and a black one that shows up just
for the finale and is a lot harder to do in. Sarone's perfidy is so
extensive (he mimics the snake by constricting Denise to death with
a neck-snapping leg-lock) that it goes beyond sheer deviltry, as expressed
by numberless underlit close-ups of him chuckling nastily, and exists
simply as a plot contrivance, making one wonder why he bothered to hijack
this bunch of amateurs rather than go up-river with his own confederates.
As the distributors - who handed out hissing snake-in-the-tin toys and
bottles of 'anaconda serum' at the screening - doubtless realise, this
is truly terrible but by no means unentertaining. First Published In: Sight and Sound July 1997 pp.35-36 (UK) Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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