Anaconda

Review by Jason Donner

 

There's something kind of stupidly fun about camp horror and Anaconda is really about as campy as modern horror gets.  I call it "horror" when there's really nothing horrific about it, just a little icky if you have a snake phobia.  The only real horror here belong to the talents involved.  Let's face it, when the situation is so redonkulous that it looks like even the stars of the movie can't quite believe they're filming it, you've got a handful of crap but at least this time around it's fun crap.

The nicest thing I can say about Anaconda is that it is preposterous, but it's fun preposterousness.  Watching Owen Wilson, Kari Wuher, and Ice Cube ham it up in a ridiculous movie only to be eclipsed by Jon Voight whose overacting burns as bright as the core of the sun on account of a  bet he must have lost is hilarious and the plot (several people who try and hunt down and then are hunted by a giant snake) is so strange that is has to be amusing on some level or another.

There is death and people getting swallowed whole as much as a PG-13 rating will allow and some of the silliest special effects ever put to film.  Don't believe me?  Check out the waterfall flowing backwards as if even the people involved in the filming of this movie couldn't be bothered with even a cheap split-screen effect to make the movie at least look decent.

Anaconda is not a good movie, that much is certain, but there is fun.  The kind of fun you have that you find afterwards trying to shower off your body in the middle of the night, but it is fun nonetheless.

We are left with that all important question when we come to this end of this review, is Anaconda actually entertaining?  I will have to stand firmly on the fence with this one: It's not a good movie, but it is entertaining for reasons the filmmakers probably never intended.  I'll just have to leave it at that.  Maybe you will enjoy it for its faults, or you will hate it because of the same faults.