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Review (Contains Spoilers)

It is fare to say that the “nature on the rampage” cycle of horror films – centred around beleaguered actors getting waylaid and gobbled up by gigantic sharks, bears, crocodiles, worms, etc – enjoyed its heyday during the latter half of the seventies. In 1975 the imaginations of audiences the world over were gripped by the phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg’s classic Jaws. In addition to breaking every box office record going and ushering in the age of the high budgeted summer blockbuster, Jaws also proved highly influential as other studios, producers and directors quickly capitalised on the success of Spielberg’s film by delivering hastily put together shockers featuring man at the mercy of the teeth and claws of the animal kingdom’s other great predators. While some of these films were good enough to survive on their own merits – William Girdler’s independent hit Grizzly (1976), Jeff Lieberman’s skin-crawling carnivorous worm opus Squirm (also 1976) and Joe Dante’s semi-spoof Piranha (1978) are three that spring immediately to mind – most of these nature on the rampage efforts were nondescript and the cycle had by and large burned itself out by the end of the seventies.

However, over the course of the last decade the nature on the rampage cycle has enjoyed something of a box office revival with a whole new generation of hokey giant monster flicks arriving with tongue placed firmly in cheek to assume the reigns dropped by their repetitious seventies predecessors. Looking back retrospectively much of the credit (or blame if you prefer) for reviving this once dormant cinematic trend must be laid at the door of Anaconda. Financed by studio giants Columbia Pictures, directed by Peruvian filmmaker Luis Llosa and with a cast featuring the legendary Jon Voight and Jennifer Lopez (then only on the cusp of fame), Anaconda marked a successful bid to revive the nature on the rampage subgenre for a dawn of the 21st century generation of cinemagoers. While most critics howled with derision Anaconda, with its simplistic tale of a National Geographic documentary team journeying up the Amazon river only to run afoul of both Jon Voigt’s sadistic hunter and the gigantic serpent of the title, proved to be just the ticket in 1997 as audiences lapped up its giant man-eating snake thrills with gusto. Anaconda resultantly proved to be a box-office hit recouping a worldwide box-office gross of over $135,000,000 off of its $45,000,000 budget.

The financial success of Anaconda demonstrated to other major studios that there was still money to be made out of the essentially critic proof nature on the rampage cycle and sure enough the other big boys such as Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros and New Line soon followed suit resulting in more big budget savage animal hokum such as Lake Placid (1999), Deep Blue Sea (also 1999) and more recently Snakes On A Plane (2006). The box-office success of these films coupled with easy access to CGI technology in turn offered much encouragement to the producers of cheap, straight to DVD horror flicks. As a result the last ten years have witnessed a glut of bargain basement horror fodder featuring badly rendered CGI predators, prime examples being Gary Jones’ Spiders (2000), John Eyres’ Octopus (2000) and fallen horror legend Tobe Hooper’s awful Crocodile (also 2000), all of which break new grounds in terms of descriptive simplicity in titling if nothing else. Meanwhile Anaconda – the film in many ways guilty of reviving this craze – has itself spawned a belated sequel in the shape of Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid (2004). At the time of writing two additional sequels Anaconda 3: The Offspring and Anaconda 4: Trail Of Blood – featuring the acting talents of David Hasselhoff and John Rhys-Davies – are both in their post-production stages and are set to air on the Sci-Fi Channel later in 2008 before no doubt making their way to DVD bargain buckets everywhere.

Anaconda begins with a National Geographic documentary team fronted by female director Terri Flores (Lopez) and intrepid scientist Dr Steven Cale (Stoltz) setting off by boat along the Amazon. The aim of their journey is to shoot a documentary about an elusive Amazonian Indian tribe known as “The People of the Mist”. The expedition takes an unexpected turn when the team come to the rescue of a stranded Paraguayan snake poacher named Paul Sarone (Voight).

When a freak diving accident involving a deadly poisonous wasp leaves Dr Cale incapacitated, Sarone insistently drives Terri and the rest of the team into changing course and sailing down a small tributary. Terri soon becomes suspicious of Sarone’s true intentions and sure enough it is soon revealed that Sarone true goal is to hunt and capture a gigantic 40 foot anaconda – a ferocious constrictor capable of killing and eating man. When Sarone commandeers the boat the team realise to their horror that the deranged hunter intends using them as live bait in order to catch his quarry. Sure enough terror soon ensues as the monstrous snake begins picking off its human prey one by one.

Despite the largely negative critical reception which greeted its original theatrical release back in 1997, Anaconda actually happens to be terrific, uncomplicated fun provided the viewer is willing to sit back and free themselves of any unrealistic expectations. While the titular anaconda itself does not put in its first proper appearance until around the forty minute mark, director Luis Llosa succeeds in maintaining interest via a genuinely suspenseful and well crafted build up. The cautionary opening text detailing the predatory skills and habits of man-eating anacondas establishes a pleasant aura of trepidation which is then tantalisingly maintained up until the deadly serpent’s first onslaught. Prowling POV camerawork on the waters surface and brief glimpses of the snake slithering through the undergrowth do a fine job of conveying the sense of the anaconda as a constant, omnipresent menace. In addition a scene in which the monster attacks and crushes the life out of a poor panther, leaving only one solitary, dislodged feline eyeball behind offers an unsettling taster of the fate awaiting the more disposable cast members. Llosa also utilises genuine Amazonian locations (much of the film was shot in Brazil) to good effect, creating a strong sense of peril lurking in the water and foliage which surrounds the protagonist’s boat.

In all honesty it must be conceded that the films protagonists are really an assembly of rather familiar caricatures. For instance we have the knowledgeable and intrepid white scientist and leader of the expedition, the hard-bitten Hispanic beauty, the gangsta rap loving streetwise black cameraman, the bumbling English toff and of course that old chestnut of the deranged, sadistic hunter whose obsession with stalking his quarry – in this case the anaconda of the films title – has driven him to psychosis. However, good performances and rather wry characterisation ensures that in this instance familiarity fortunately does not breed contempt.

Indeed, despite the thinness of the material the cast of Anaconda manage to acquit themselves rather well and add to the films already considerable entertainment value. While she would later exploit her high profile as a media celebrity to coast conceitedly through roles – most notably in the infamously dreadful self indulgence Gigli (2003) – Jennifer Lopez is actually quite impressive here as she strikes the right balance between tomboy action sequence heroics and more typical “female in peril” vulnerability. Ice Cube – who along with Ice-T was almost the most capable of the many rappers turned actors – is also serviceable as is Australian born British acting stalwart Jonathan Hyde who turns in a fine, semi-comic performance as the well to do as Westridge – the British presenter and narrator of the documentary who from the minute he stumbles aboard looks like prime fodder for the crushing coils of the giant snake. By contrast Anaconda largely wastes the talents of the perennially underrated Eric Stoltz who spends two thirds of the film lying unconscious. Similarly Owen Wilson, who would ascend to stardom in the 2000’s, also features in a supporting role, but is given relatively little to do.

Much of the critical mockery directed at Anaconda tends to centre on the performance of ponytail donning screen legend Jon Voight who stars as the irredeemably evil Paraguayan snake hunter Paul Sarone who forces the documentary team into assisting him in his obsessive hunt for the elusive, man-eating Anaconda. Many critics focused much of their attention of Voight’s performance, accusing him of shameless overacting. In truth this is actually a pretty hard point to dispute as Voight leers, sneers, hisses, and gurns and generally behaves like a cut rate Hannibal Lecter. However, what Voight clearly realises (and the critics clearly don’t) is that glorified big budget b-pictures like this are essentially little more than a pantomime and far from marring the film Voight’s deliberately hammy performance actually carries it whenever the titular snake is off-screen for any length of time. It should also be stressed that while Voight does ham it up he never does so to the point of rendering the dastardly Sarone comedic or unconvincing.

However, even Voight is upstaged by the titular anaconda itself which once revealed soon establishes itself in no uncertain terms as the real star of the show. The animatronic model snake is superb and the level of work which clearly went into capturing the fine details of such a creature, from the interiors of its fearsome mouth, to the flickering tongue and cold reptilian eyes make it a genuinely memorable horror movie monster. Certain sequences in the film are forced to rely on the necessary evil of CGI effects – which in this writer’s opinion never ever look convincing – but sensibly the use of CGI is mostly kept to the minimum. Director Llosa succeeds in making the anaconda’s numerous attacks on the petrified film crews boat genuinely hair-raising viewing and also delivers several impressive set-piece deaths, in particular a heart-stopping scene in which one unfortunate protagonist leaps from a high waterfall only for the snake to twist around and seize them in midair.

Unfortunately after delivering the thrills and suspense in highly entertaining doses for the lions share of the films running length, Llosa unfortunately lets Anaconda go off the boil slightly during it’s over the top extended finale. Unfortunately the final scenes make the cardinal mistake of over exposing a monster which up until this point has been mainly shown in brief flashes. Scenes in which the snake chases the few remaining survivors around a disused riverside factory at lightning speed look ridiculously cartoonish and the CGI fakery is detrimentally blatant. However, this dubious conclusion is redeemed to a degree by a grisly, jaw-dropping set-piece in which one protagonist is ingested whole by the deadly, giant reptile – complete with a fantastic camera angle from inside the creatures gullet – then regurgitated whilst still (barely) alive. Brief shots of the animatronic snake writhing around on fire are also similarly impressive.

In conclusion I have to say that in this case the glib critics and cynical fan boys got it completely wrong and Anaconda thoroughly deserved its considerable success at the international box-office. Watching Anaconda again in retrospect over a decade after its original release, what really hits home is how much better crafted a film it is than any of the studio backed imitators which followed in its wake. Whereas the majority of the big budget monster pictures released in recent years place so much emphasis on self-referential humour that they descend into unintentional self-parody, Anaconda by contrast succeeds where those films fail by cleverly and subtly playing upon the viewers familiarity with its basic formula in a way that enhances the films entertainment value without telegraphing every shock moment. While some of the CGI tomfoolery does leave a little to be desired, all in all a combination of spectacularly nerve-rattling set-pieces, a memorable monster, oppressive jungle atmosphere and some good performances – especially Voight’s leering baddie – ensure that Anaconda registers as a rip-roaring exercise in big budget horror hokum. If you’re looking for substance you’re quite frankly looking in the wrong place, but if you’re looking for nothing more than simple, uncomplicated, popcorn munching fun then Anaconda does exactly what it says on the tin and does so in highly entertaining fashion. .

Also Try… Spasms / Jaws / Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid / Deep Blue Sea / Lake Placid / King Cobra / Spiders / Octopus / Piranha (1978, Joe Dante).

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