‘Never look in the eyes of those you kill. They will haunt you forever…’
Has there ever been a good movie about snakes? Well, while there are thousands of straight-to-video snake offerings (Snake Outta Compton, Vipers, Komodo vs Cobra, etc), mainstream snake movies are thin on the ground (very much like the snakes themselves). Basically, you’ve got Snakes on a Plane and Anaconda. Both flirt with so-bad-it’s-good cult status, but both settle on being just bad in the end…
Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz) specialises in locating remote Amazonian tribes. While searching for the mysterious Shirishamas, a long-lost indigenous group, Cale and his team (Owen Wilson, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jonathan Hyde) encounter snake hunter and lunatic Paul Serone (Jon Voight). Then, as the title suggests, a bloody anaconda shows up.
The thing with a monster movie is that you need a good monster. While there are a few moments here in which the titular snake looks convincing and effective, most of the time it just looks a bit… shit. Having said that, even a CGI snake manages to be more convincing than half the cast, with Voight playing not just to the back row but specifically to the back row of a theatre hundreds of miles away. This is a performance so hammy that Jon Hamm, eating a ham sandwich in Hamburg, couldn’t even come close. The only actor to come out of this with any credit is Stoltz, who somehow manages to make his ridiculous character feel like a real person, but everyone else here is bad and should be ashamed.
I suppose the one saving grace of Luis Llosa’s film is that I was never bored. I did have an existential crisis halfway through, but then I imagine most of the cast did while making the film, so at least I have an affinity with them in that respect. To recap then, the answer to my original question is a resounding ‘No’. There are no good snake movies. Present company included.
