BOA VS. PYTHON (2004) More fun than AVP...and that is so, so sad. I don't usually think you can solve problems in moviemaking simply by spending more money on them, but Boa Vs. Python might have added up to a movie worth seeing for killer animal/giant monster fans, had it an effects budget that could support two giant snakes (even one couldn't hurt). You'd never guess it looking at the box, but it's well acted, has a not-bad plot, some (intentionally!) funny dialogue, and is made slickly and with some energy often lost on this kind of movie. I don't know if this is supposed to have any relationship to the recent Boa or Python movies, but I enjoyed it a lot more than either one - and for many of the right reasons this time. It's still not quite enough though. If you complained about the snake in Anaconda, you'll have lots more to complain about here; the two giant CGI snakes are never very convincing, occasionally do battle in equally unconvincing CGI environments (the scene in a subway station would've been par for a video game around 1998 or so) and I think the only animatronics are used to show a meter-or-so-long portion of one's back. And another thing you'd never guess by looking at the box; there is no showdown between the snakes in a downtown street while a helicopter fires missiles at them. An idle beefcake playboy (Adam Kendrick) with a super-hot girlfriend who hates snakes but nevertheless has one tattooed on her back (Angel Boris) wants to hunt The Ultimate Prey, so he has an eighty-foot python imported just so he and his friends can hunt it. But the python gets loose and holes up in a Pennsylvania water treatment plant, so the FBI - wasting no time by refusing to believe there's a giant python on the loose - decides not to risk agents (or public safety by gassing the place) by sending an even bigger snake down after it, the scarlet boa. So really it's more like boa vs. python vs. a squad of hunter archetypes (two camo-and-orange weekend warriors, a wealthy Texan, a sniper who only brought one bullet because that's all he needs bwa ha ha, and a bald "modern primitive" guy who seems to think crossbow bolts are going to hurt an eighty-foot snake). If you thought the forty-foot snake in Anaconda was pushing it, this movie is for people who thought it wasn't big enough. I'm not so concerned if this movie's snakes have to be eighty feet, so be it. Next time maybe they'll be a hundred feet, two hundred feet. Maybe we'll eventually get a snake so big it circles the globe and bites its own tail. I was a little puzzled that this eighty (to a hundred) -foot scarlet boa is content to eat teeny tiny five-foot-long boa constrictors when his keeper (Canadian TV actor David Hewlett) and two other people are in its cage with it. If it's not dangerous, why is it kept in with hydraulically-locked doors, and lasers? Former Playmate Jaime Bergman also appears, winning a bet in her first scene as to how long she can stay underwater, and you just know that's gonna come in handy later. She trains dolphins to sweep for mines, and with that equipment she helps Hewlett surgically grafts a camera to the boa's head so that we can get monstervision shots while the two humans (and the FBI guy, Kirk B.R. Woller, who's had a lot of small roles in a lot of big movies) try to keep up. Everybody and everything runs afoul of everybody (and -thing) else. Apart from the absurdity of the size of its specimens, the people who made Boa Vs. Python seem to have done at least a little reading up on their animals, and there's at least as much credible information about snakes in this movie as there was in Anaconda. Hewlett, at least, is able to sell it as if were genuine - he's a good actor, and probably the only reason why this new Stargate spinoff series piques my curiosity at all. He can't sell the sob story about his sister though. Alas, those effects keep it from being more than what it is. The boa and the python are at least easy to tell apart (the boa's red, the python's green) but neither one is going to rock your world, make you recoil in horror, or make you rewind to see anything they do more than once. They don't work in that "you rarely see the monster" Jaws way; you just have to grit your teeth and pretend they're more convincing than they are. Boa Vs. Python is slickly directed and edited with some zip to it, and the dialogue and situations got a bunch of giggles from me that seem to have been intended and for the right reasons - I've almost forgotten what that's like! Angel Boris's bath scene is totally gratuitous, but I so, so, so didn't mind. The movie more or less earns its R rating otherwise (more than once, those snakes make themselves content with only half a person to eat), but I really like nudity. Bergman teases us early on but doesn't deliver. Of course it's ridiculous - too much so when the python performs cunnilingus on an unsuspecting girl, and I was never really clear on what made everybody so confident of the boa's chances of victory that they would convince its keeper to put it in such a situation. But it's pretty fun, moreso than almost any of these giant-animal movies I've seen in the last few years. If you can get past the effects, it might be well worth the rental. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE