ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID (2004) Promises so much, but delivers so little The sequel to Anaconda does everything exactly 100% right for precisely as long as it takes to read the first word in the title. After that it's all downhill, title, movie and all. Pharmaceutical company execs believe they have found the key to eternal life in the blood orchid, a super-rare flower in Borneo that blooms once every seven years and it's a good bet that bloomin' season is almost over. So they hire a rickety boat whose white captain (Johnny Messner) has been adopted by the locals, and head straight for trouble, because the blood orchid has made its way into the food chain and as a result the local anacondas have grown to huge proportions even by anaconda standards. In no other local animal is this phenomenon observed, though I suppose it's safe to assume they were all eaten by the anacondas. The captain fancies himself a bit of an expert on the area, which seems dubious after he takes a wrong turn and gets his boat destroyed over a waterfall. He's also the snake expert, the guy who can be counted on to tell you all about the awful things the anacondas stalking them do, though he does not mention that anacondas are native only to South America which is a hell of a long swim from Borneo. I knew this going in, but I was willing to let it go if the characters didn't specifically refer to the snakes as anacondas, but they do. Fifty-six minutes into the movie, the expert starts wondering if it's mating season. Now with a title like that, exactly the title I was hoping for except for the "blood orchid" part (blood orchid? Why would any potential viewer care about a blood orchid?), you'd think that what we're in for was a whole bunch of snakes making trouble for these people. I'm not a hard guy to please when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm really not. Anacondas? I went in with visions of throngs of giant snakes eating people and puking them up and swarming all over helpless victims, gulping them down like popcorn shrimp, and what I got was just a few lightning-quick attacks, just one snake each time (first snake attack's forty-two minutes in), and it might as well be the same snake. They're not even very tough, considering that they're fifty feet long and weigh who knows how much; one is killed with a thrown knife (wuss!). The snake action is pretty lame, and there's not much other action here, unlike the original film which still pulled off some good non-ophidian thrills. There's a false scare by monkey (the same monkey which plays a monkey in every movie that has a monkey in it), but it probably shouldn't scare anyone because what other animal could possibly fit in that little cupboard that all those rattling sounds are coming from? There's also a leech scene that rivals that in Stand By Me (one of the movie's few successful moments), and a ridiculous wrestling match with an alligator. Only with twelve minutes left in the movie do we get the big writhing "snake orgy" of anacondas, and it's not very thrilling. Aside from the expert with so little expertise, there's a Southern belle and a jive talking black guy ("Do that in my neighborhood, that's yo' ass") who laments that he missed out on courtside seats, and does double duty as the panicky idiot. I really really really wanted him to die, and I was heartened to find that the actor playing him did not have a hit record. Which just makes for another way that this movie let me down. The writers of Anaconda are credited here with the story and the "based on", but the script itself was by four others. The story in Anacondas has no connection with the events in the first movie, which are dismissed by the characters as urban myth, probably because they find it hard to believe there are anacondas in South America. The dialogue has the kind of low, low, I didn't know brows got this low lowbrow pop culture references ("I'm votin' you off this island!" "Can you hear me now?") which make it clear that the people making this movie weren't trying to make a film for the ages. Anacondas is sure to disappoint fans of Anaconda, detractors of Anaconda, anybody looking for a movie about a bunch of anacondas, and anacondas themselves, who should feel free to visit director Dwight Little and the screenwriters to express their displeasure. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE