Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

Review by Jason Gaston

Since most of the sequels this year from Spider-Man 2 to The Bourne Supremacy have ruled, I guess it's only natural that the cosmic scales would balance themselves out and we'd get a few cinematic continuations that completely blow. Now, granted, the 1997 shlock-fest, Anaconda, was not what I would call a great triumph of filmmaking. I mean, simply put... it was awful. So bad, in fact, that it became unintentionally funny.

Well, to continue that tradition of bad and unintentionally funny, we now have a somewhat sequel called Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. This time around, Jon Voight, J-Lo, and Owen Wilson may not be embarrassing themselves for 90 minutes, but the dialogue is worse, the plot is even more atrocious, the acting is more horrendous, and oddly - after seven years of special effect advances, the special effects look even more amateurish.

Here's the plot... it's complicated so keep up. Uh... There's a flower called the blood orchid that can make you live forever so a bunch of edibles go to the deepest parts of Boreno to pick them up. While there, big snakes start eating them.

And... that's about it.

Sure, there's the tried old trick of making one of the characters a villain so the movie will have some sort of human conflict, but that's really immaterial... Anacondas is about big snakes eating screaming people and that's it. There was no other reason to make this movie. Why anyone would put any real effort into making something so bad... so unentertaining... and so pointless and unmemorable is beyond me but, then again, if you happen to be unlucky enough to catch this movie you'll see just how little real effort was put into the making of this movie.

This movie is bad... bad in every sense of the word. It's a crime against Joe Public who makes a little over minimum wage doing hard manual labor that seven... count them... seven Hollywood writers actually got money to write this thing.

To top it all off the actors are terrible... Granted, they don't have a lot to work with, but these people... awful! Could Johnny Messner possibly be troubled to add more than one note to his acting? And what about Eugene Byrd? Good lord, was it his goal in this movie to be the most annoying character in the flick? What's worse, the writers actually go out of their way to save this character at every possible turn... even sacrificing the few interesting characters to do it! Was it some kind of obligation to keep the screaming black man - some writer's idea of hilarious comic relief - in the movie as long as possible?

Trust me, you start rooting for the snakes early on in this movie.

I really wasn't expecting a whole lot from this flick and I didn't get a whole lot so I'm not really overly disappointed... other than the fact that I willingly spent money to see it. You may find yourself laughing at this movie more than you should which may give it some value in camp circles, but in the end Anacondas is a stupid watered-down horror sequel that just shouldn't have been made. With no terror, no suspense, and not even enough gratuitous gore to satisfy your base horror needs, this man-eating snake movie should just slither to the Blockbuster bargain bin where it belongs.