Year of release: 1997.
Run time: 89 Minutes.
Budget: $45 Million.
Gross revenue: $136,885,767.
Have you ever re-watched a movie ten years after you saw it as a kid? It's a fun experiment to do, especially if you really enjoyed the film in question all those years ago. When I saw Anaconda at the impressionable age of ten, I thought it was a pretty fucking awesome movie. It had everything a boy yearning for adventure could want: A boat trip along the dark Amazonian jungle, a scary old snake-hunter played by Jon Voight, and of course, a giant fucking snake that was going to suffocate all the minor characters on the boat before eating them not once, but twice. I'm serious. The opening text scroll for Anaconda contains the following line: “Unique among snakes, [Anacondas] are not satisfied after eating a victim. They will regurgitate their prey in order to kill and eat again.” Take that Steven Spielberg! Your lame shark only ever ate mother-fuckers once!
Of course, at the age of ten I was only just being permitted to go and see moderately violent movies, and so Anaconda was probably one of the first horror movies I ever saw. The horror of the creature feature genre was new and fresh, probably because a lot of it actually came from my imagination as opposed to what was shown on screen. When I saw Anaconda, I felt frightened during the first half of the movie because I could just imagine the snake slithering around under the surface of the river, plotting with its reptile brain to devour Jennifer Lopez. Now fourteen years and a hundred or so creature features later, I'm much more demanding when it comes to quality.
It should therefore come as no surprise that upon my second viewing, I can now safely say that I regard Anaconda as such a piece of fucking shit that I'm simply flabbergasted at its box office performance. There is not really one redeeming feature in this feature. All we get for our trouble is some shitty CGI, Jon Voight doing a very bad Spanish accent, and Ice Cube looking completely out of place amongst the mostly caucasian cast. I know a lot of people enjoy watching bad movies because they are so bad, but Anaconda isn't even good-bad. It's just plain bad-bad. The snake, whether it is rendered using CGI or in giant puppet form, sucks arse. It doesn't look vaguely threatening in any aspect. Indeed, whenever we get a close-up of the snake this is what we get to see:
"Hiiisssssssss mother-fucker!"
See how stupid it looks?
Apart from the snake, there is no real tension in the film. Certain scenarios occur, but you never really give a damn how they might turn out. It would even be enjoyable if it was the case that the characters were so badly written that you wanted them to die, but they aren't bad; just bland. To say that Anaconda fizzles would be insulting to inexpensive fireworks.
I did find one shot that I thought was pretty interesting from a gross-out standpoint. It occurs near the end of the film when the giant snake finally devours Jon Voight. For a split second, the camera cuts to inside the snake's mouth looking out. It's a pretty cool shot, and you definitely get the sense that Voight is headed toward some slimey, unknowable place, but it doesn't last for long enough, cutting back to a bad CGI depiction of Jon Voight getting eaten.
"No Angelina! Don't eat me! I'm your father!"
I can't get over how many people liked this movie. To put some perspective on the whole mess; Rabbit Hole, the recent drama which earned Nicole Kidman an academy award nomination for Best Actress, only took $2.9 million at the box office, against this piece of shit which took close to $137 million. The 90s were strange times, my friends.
One star:
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