No one ever goes sets out to make a bad sequel – or at least, I hope not. Oh sure, the money men probably can’t see past the dollar signs in their eyes, but no matter how much artistic integrity may be missing from the reasoning behind a follow-up that nobody asked for, the people actually on set must give some sort of shit, right?
I only ask this because after watching the sequel to ridiculous, Jennifer Lopez, snake epic, Anaconda, I got a very real sense that the people responsible were at least trying to make an entertaining flick even if the final result doesn’t exactly manage the job.
Anaconda, in case you needed reminding, was Luis Llosa’s enjoyably dopey, 1997, killer serpent flick that saw J-Lo get chased, Owen Wilson get swallowed and Jon Voight get regurgitated while Ice Cube pulled the same expression for a full 105 minutes straight. Simply put: what more could there be said concerning gargantuan snakes that the orginal hadn’t already nailed?
Not much, if The Hunt For The Blood Orchid is any indication…
A team of researchers from a New York pharmaceutical firm have traveled to Borneo in order to look for the fabled Blood Orchid (or perrinnia immortalis, if you’re feeling snobby), a legendary flower that grows once in a blue moon and, if harvested, could act as a wonder drug that may even stop aging. Excitedly maintaining that bottled eternal youth could be “bigger than viagra”, the six city slickers seek out recommended river boat captain, Jin-Soon (aka. Bill Johnson – it’s a pronunciation thing apparently) to take them to the remote area where the orchid grows. Bill, who turns out to be the sort of ex-special forces guy who nonchalantly fights crocodiles to the death at a moment’s notice, reluctantly agrees and before you know it, thus gang of bickering scientists have somehow stranded themselves on the middle of a hostile jungle after Bill’s boat sails off the edge of a waterfall. However, before anyone realises that it mifgr have been smart to take a closer look at Bill’s credentials, a far more dangerous threat makes itself known after it swallows one of their number like a hotdog earing champion.
It seems that in this part of Borneo, the super-massive anacondas that populate the area are in heat and are converging toward the most viable female in the vicinity in order to engage in a big-ass, snake orgy known as ‘the mating ball’. Realising that if they don’t leave this part of the jungle pronto, they’re liable to become the after-snack once the anacondas start their phobia inducing fuck-pile, the survivors try to leave only to find that one of their number will do anything to secure the orchid – even sacrifice his buddies to a horny horde of slithering bastards.
To pick up on a point I made earlier, while Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid, isn’t exactly a great movie, it is far better than it has any right to be thanks to a budget that allows for a little scope and a director who knows what he’s doing. Helmed by Dwight H. Little who delivered the perfectly reasonable Halloween 4, Marked For Death and Murder At 1600, Anacondas contains enough rain machines, on-location shot stuff and vaguely familiar faces to seem a little bit glitzier than your basic type of unnecessary sequel. When compared to the average Lake Placid sequel, Anacondas is certainly a noticable step up and carries the appropriate levels of sheen to almost justify the fact that it actually got a cinematic release.
However, once you scratch beneath the surface, the movie proves to be scripted just as shodily as a dirt cheap killer animal movie coated with dust at the bottom of the bargin bin at a run down service station. Quite why the pharmaceutical company will happily let its staff brave the jungles of Borneo and not just hire seasoned professionals is something the movie shoves under the carpet faster than a sloppy cleaning lady and matters aren’t helped by the group acting like their on a corporate bonding weekend either. The various things these dumbasses say sound like they’ve been created by a generic dialogue generator as they constantly utter things like “Cut the bullshit.” and “Are you high?” like random NPCs whenever the script demands that they try and sound remotely human. The actors try and fill the muddy shoes of their stock characters as best they can with Johnny Messner visually struggling to maintain his gravelly tone as Bill and Matthew Marsden sets his eyebrows to villain as the douchebag who desires the fortune, glory and billions of dollars that the Blood Orchid can bring him. Elsewhere, Eugene Byrd fills the “aw hell naw” role that Ice Cube filled so capably in the first film as he screams about everything wanting to eat him when all the noise he makes is probably the thing that’s putting him most in danger.
Also in attendance is Morris Chestnut who seems to be utterly unaware that the whole reason he’s here is to enact the same trick that Deep Blue Sea played with Samuel L. Jackson and he genuinely seems more surprised than anyone that he’s destined for a one-way trip through a snake’s esophagus. However, most curious of all is the fact that the movie legitimately doesn’t seem to know which of the two characters played by KaDee Strickland and Salli Richardson is supposed to be the female lead until the end of the movie. The latter seems primed to experience a shift from snooty rich-bitch (“I like science, I just like money better.”) to Ripley-esque warrior that ultimately never happens while the former spends most of the time under Marsden’s thumb and suddenly becomes a head-chopping bad-ass out of nowhere.
Still, maybe the bland performances and a script as weak as a malnourished kitten might have been saved by some righteous anaconda effects, but unfortunately it seems that Little may have overspent on his rain machine budget, because the CGI snakes here look about as real as a 1990’s screensaver.
Still, they swoop, slither, pounce and gobble the scream cast well enough despite looking like frickin cartoons and the mating ball, while not the ick-fest it could of been, is still something of a nicely queasy concept. Little even manages to pull out the odd visual blinder, too, with a crane shot of an impossibly long serpent winding it’s way, unseen in and out of a string of potential victims actually approaching the potential of the orginal.
However, even though Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid is a surprisingly painless watch, it sacrifices real scares on a floppy plot that prioritizes Congo-style adventure over phobia baiting terror and a script so under cooked it could cause botulism.
For goodness snake…
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