This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Fantastic!

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a mind-numbing but entertaining monster snake movie. It is a quite exciting adventure but the depth is non-existent and there is no humour. It's all totally ridiculous. It isn't especially violent and there is no nudity but Jennifer is looking mighty fine so it is all good. I quite enjoyed it as there is no thought power required. One of the best giant snake movies and with that title comes pure cheesiness.

Sexy Jennifer Lopez, evil Jon Voight and Mr Cool Owen Wilson are on a boat attacked by a giant snake.As an another reviewer noted, this flick has sort of a retro Creature From The Black Lagoon-feel to it which draws me in. Also, a touch of a disaster movie as we have a mixed bunch of people stuck in a confined space (a small boat).The music score, which nicely plays under the dialogue, is very effective.The now dated CGI does a bit of damage to the flick as a whole, but with a cast like Lopez/Voight/Wilson...we have other things to focus on.

A film crew sets sail along the Amazon to film a documentary on the 'People of the Mist'. Along the way they stumble across Paul Serone (Jon Voight) an expert 'snake trapper' who is stranded at the side of the river claiming that the propeller broke on his boat. Serone is seemingly helpful at the beginning, but as the journey unfolds his real 'persona' starts to come through putting the whole crew in danger.The premise for this film is good on paper and seems to be a cross between King Kong and Dead Calm. Unfortunately, it is more Dead Calm than King Kong (I didn't like Dead Calm, but this film is definitely worse). The film attempts to be thrilling and exciting the problem here is that you can predict the outcome of everything way before it happens meaning that there isn't really any suspense. The worst example of this is Serone's re-appearance after the surviving members of the crew thought they'd killed him (like a classic pantomime villain). The dialogue was fairly dull and clunky with only the odd exchange between Ice Cube and Jonathan Hyde resembling anything remotely funny or interesting.The writing in this film is at best inconsistent and at worst awful; as the narrative unfolds Serone starts to pick off the crew one by one, but early on Cale is on the verge of dying, but Serone opts to save him by cutting a hole in his throat or windpipe in order to allow the poison to seep out (I think), but why keep him alive? It may have been to buy Serone time to trick the crew into believing that he's directing the crew to a hospital, but it seemed a long winded and stupid way to co-ordinate his plan. It also means that he'll always have one more person that he needs to kill. Another good one is when he says that the snakes have heat sensors to enable them to be able to detect humans in the water, but yet Serone walks through the water himself at one point. If he knew that they could detect heat then why did he walk through the water himself and risk getting himself killed? Was Serone perhaps on a suicide mission or was that just a dumb piece of writing? I'm inclined to believe the latter.Voight was easily the best thing about this film; his constant mugging and grimacing in front of the camera was just a joy to watch. It's almost like he was saying to himself 'I'm too good for this trash' and he'd be right. I wonder if he'd modelled his own performance on that of Robert De Niro's performance in Cape Fear. The only other person who came close to being as good to Voight was Hyde but even he fell a long way short. The rest of the cast put in sub-par performances with many of the crew merely being fodder for the snakes.To sum it up then it's a pretty dreadful film with only Jon Voight attempting to give it any semblance of fun and excitement. Taking Voight out of the equation you're left with a film with very little else that's good about it.

At one time Werner Herzog tried to bring opera/commerce to the jungles of the Amazon with his film Fitzcarraldo, which featured as its primary set piece a boat being dragged over a mountain side. Gone are those days; indeed fifteen years after that in 1997 audiences got just a quick scene of opera being blared in the jungle - this comes after Ice Cube's "hippity hop" has played, which actually isn't that bad - while Jon Voight hijacks a small boat of documentary filmmakers (through stealth) to hunt after giant snakes. So it goes.Anaconda was a movie I watched many times when it was on HBO. I probably recognized then it was trash, but it was highly watchable trash, with convincing performances (for what they're asked to do) and some high-grade cheesy lines and mannerisms. Seeing it again today, it holds up as a B-movie blow-out, and is dated mostly by its bad CGI of snakes and has one too many climaxes for comfort. It's one thing when Fatal Attraction does it, but this...It's highly mockable (i.e. Rifftrax took it on live this year), but perhaps the filmmakers knew it? The actors don't seem to, certainly not hapless Owen Wilson - or maybe Voight does, and in his way it's one of the few times, albeit in a total cartoonish performance where he has practically the same grimacing facial expression with Paraguaian accent from start to finish - and maybe that helps elevate it. It's still watchable... which is about the best to say about it, with some competent direction helping along the way - along with some befuddling choices like a Snake-POV camera.Maybe it's best today as a party movie: turn it on, have some brews, and laugh at how that snake just seems to keep coming back and back again (and if it's more than one giant snake, why is it such a big deal?) Oh well... sequels came of this as well.