If killer animal franchises were Infinity Stones then someone should’ve sent the Avengers to have a stern chat with the Syfy Channel a few years back. You see, not only had they already absorbed the Lake Placid franchise into their low budget collective, but in 2013 they metaphorically spiked their viewer’s drinks with the disturbingly endless Sharknado series that somehow managed to garner a cult following. However, what you may not realise is that the third Anaconda movie (yes, there’s a third one) also deputed on the notorious channel because someone out there genuinely believed that screening this movie somehow made good business sense.
While you could hardly describe the second movie as out and out unwatchable (although at times it came dangerously close), the existence of a third movie still managed to raise some unanswerable questions as to who the hell keeps watching these things, but someone obviously thought that adding David Hasselhoff and John Rhys Davis to the snakey shenanigans was a sure-fire way to score ratings… Yeah, sorry guys. Not even one of your monster anacondas would be able to swallow that.
Remember that Blood Orchid from the last movie that was supposed to be able to cure all diseases? No? Well, don’t worry about it, I’ll steer you through the particulars.
Anyway, this mythical pant has been somehow obtained by a genetics lab based in Romania owned by booming voiced industrialist Peter Murdoch and under the guise of various scientists including Amanda Hayes they’ve been tinkering with the DNA of those massive anaconda’s found in Borneo to try and get the plant’s healing properties to jive with humans.
However, before you can say “Deep Blue Sea”, one of the more aggressive wrigglers busts out, slaughters the majority of the staff and frees the anaconda queen in order to slither off and drop a whole mess of snake babies near a populated area. Immediately the call goes out to ridiculously alpha male hunter, Stephen Hammett, but as he’s currently busy beating the shoit out of people he owes money too while smugly announcing: “Always know the animal before the hunt.”, his motley team is sent out instead with Hayes and spineless Yes Man, Pinkus, bringing up the rear.
Before you know it, we’ve switched from lazy, Deep Blue Sea ripoff to lazier Predator ripoff as the bug-eyed, spike-tailed serpents start working their way through the supporting cast at a fighting rate. Thankfully, Hammett shows up almost in the nick of time and a plan is made to run down these rampaging reptiles and put and end to them once and for all. But even through Hays was dumb enough to genetically rear giant anacondas with spikes in their tails, she’s smart enough to smell that something isn’t quite on the up and up with their two-fisted, macho saviour…
While no one could ever mistake the second Anaconda film for a four star belter, there was something admittedly watchable about it that prevented it sliding into the same turgid territory as your average Lake Placid sequel and thankfully (and believe me, “thankfully” is something of a stretch) the third outing for those bone crushing hissers is more of the same – mixing acceptable production values with a script that throws in the odd, well-staged death.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a lot wrong here, starting with some predictably atrocious CGI that fails to believably render anything from sprays of cartoonish arterial blood to the two, monstrous snakes who weirdly have the same sort of bulging eyes that Beetlejuice has when he turned into a serpent, but at least the director – the improbably named Don E. FauntLeroy – has a decent feel for pacing. Basically, Anaconda 3 moves fast enough that by the time your brain has processed every time the movie done something dumb, it’s already moved on to the next one. Be it the fact that even though we’re constantly told there’s two snakes, you don’t actually see them together in the same shot until about an hour into the film; or that no one bothers to explain the stingers the snakes have until ten minutes after they’ve used them to impale a nameless labcoat; or the fact that Crystal Allen’s vest wearing heroine keeps having flashbacks of things that literally only happened in the previous scene.
On top of that, we also get to spend time in the presence of two men that I genuinely believe have never turned down a role between them in their entire lives: Mr. David (Am I still relevant yet?) Hasselhoff and Mr. John (Will stop acting when I’m dead) Rhys-Davis. To be fair, it’s a pleasure to have them on board as the sight of them obviously chewing the scenery makes the whole ordeal a lot easier to stomach and while Rhys-Davis’ magnificently shitty boss man bows out of the flick early (after causing all the trouble in the first place by teasing one of the anacondas with a flashlight), Hasselhoff just seems stoked to be there. Sending up his tough guy image with some truly ridiculous lines such as describing the local military as reliable as a bottle as Jack at an AA meeting and trying to rally his terrified men by excitedly boasting “You follow my lead and I’ll lead you right up this snake’s ass!”, he’s uneasily the best thing in it primarily because you can tell he doesn’t give a single, flying fuck about the end product as he cashes his check. However, it’s the fact that the Hoff switches at the end to actually play the villain that gives this disposable time waster a small inkling of originality – not that it lasts long, mind…
FauntLeroy (just can’t get used to typing that name…) wears his influences on his sleeve to the point where he blatantly steals whole moments from other films wholesale without a second thought, having Hays coat herself in mud to shield her from an Anaconda’s heat vision in a “tribute’ to Predator and do you remember that bit in Aliens where Bishop gets speared by the alien queen’s tail – because FauntLeroy sure does has he replays the scene wholesale with the slightly less impressive backdrop of a Romanian barn.
Still, as shitty, unnecessary, killer animal sequels go, Anaconda 3: Offspring scores dubious points in the so bad it’s good category and if nothing else, it boasts quite possibly the most cringe worthy, kill-the-monster quip I have ever heard in the form of Allen bellowing “Happy trails, slimy bitch!” at her pixelated foe.
There’s not a lot to love here, but by god, I also cant bring myself to entirely hate this cheap and cheerful, chaotic, coil rumble.
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