Free Anaconda Movies
Athenasby Regalado
When a documentary crew traveling through the Amazon jungle picks up a stranded man, they are unaware of the trouble that will occur. This stranger's hobby is to capture the giant Anaconda snake, and plans to continue targeting it on their boat.
A team of mercenaries join forces with a herpetologist and an assistant from the billionaire owner who both worked in a genetic research lab, Wexel Hall, to capture the snakes after they escaped from the lab, until they find themselves needing to stop them before it's too late.
In Black Lake, Maine, an accident allows the two giant species, crocodiles and anacondas to be regenerated and escape towards to Clear Lake. Now, Reba teams up with Tully to find his daughter Bethany and a group of sorority girls in a deadly match between the two creatures.
A group of circus performers, on their way to what they think is a new performance location, become stranded in a lush rainforest after the boat they were on, and the captain leading the way, are eaten and destroyed by an anaconda. They cross paths with a deadly poacher who is hunting the anaconda, who realizes that he might now have enough bait to catch him. But being circus performers, they have a few survival tricks up their sleeves.
Promoting the original film's release, Sony released a free total conversion mod for Quake Mission Pack No. 1: Scourge of Armagon, which featured new snake enemies and a large Anaconda boss character.[13][14]
(CNN) -- "Anaconda" has slithered to the top of the box office heap for two weeks in a row, and it's easy to understand why. It's been quite awhile since I've had such a good time at what is, basically, a bad movie.
Blithely borrowing from "Jaws," "Alien," "Moby Dick" and countless schlocky horror movies, the story line picks up with a hapless film crew heading up the Amazon River to make a documentary about a legendary bunch of Indians.
Paul Sarone is played -- overplayed, really -- by Jon Voight. Affecting a goofy accent (pseudo-Paraguayan, maybe?) that needs to be heard to be believed, he turns in a hilariously over-the-top performance. This guy doesn't just chew on the scenery, he gobbles it whole.
There's the cynical boat captain (Vincent Castellanos); the documentary's director (Jennifer Lopez); her anthropologist-lover (Eric Stoltz, looking mighty pale); an L.A. homeboy-turned-camera dude (Ice Cube); the documentary's oh-so-intellectual narrator (Jonathan Hyde); a dim-bulb sound tech (Owen Wilson) and his dumb bunny production manager girlfriend (Kari Wuhrer). While Wuhrer is no Jamie Lee Curtis when it comes to screaming, she does contribute some effective shrieking in several scenes.
Luis Llosa's direction isn't subtle, but he deftly times the story's key set-up scenes and most of the scary stuff. Production values are basic Grade B, although Bill Butler's shrewd camerawork deserves a special nod. Randy Edelman apparently listened to John William's "Jaws" music a lot before composing his manipulate-the-audience score.
Nice post! I've been pondering a series where we look back at films either like this or highly acclaimed films that have gained/lost value. Or, in the case if this, remained about the same and have been a bit unfairly dissed. Glad to see some love for ANACONDA. I remember seeing this in theaters as well, but can't say I remember a thing about it other than someone committing suicide while the Anaconda killed his crew mates.
Any chance you saw BOA VS. PYTHON? Now I want to go watch some snake movies...
MovieMan, I have a new meme I'd like to challenge you to match at
It's the lead story now, on October 11, 2008, so check it out.
I take guilty pleasure in Anaconda, and especially in Jon Voight's go-for-broke performance. Seriously, the best giant snake movie ever. But SSSSSSS and Slither, while not giant snake movies, are pretty great reptilian pleasures too!
Dean, that is a great meme and one I'd like to tackle before I jump into political season full-throttle (on Tuesday, I'm going to start focusing exclusively on politically-themed films, both doc and narrative for a few weeks).
In fact, you may have even saved me from a tricky situation tonight, as I was going to tackle Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, which I'm not sure I can do justice to and still get up when I'm supposed to tomorrow.
True, it will take awhile to amass the list and make sure I haven't left anything off of it, but it will require less brain cells than analyzing the slippage of Griffith's formal complexity in a tale of the French Revolution (expect that one tomorrow if not tonight). Thanks.
James, glad you liked it. I haven't seen many other snake films, nor Lake Placid & that shark one that came out around the same time, which always struck me as similar films to Anaconda, though more outright-cheesy (whereas this is actually pretty solid on its own terms).
Anyway, I will be interested and probably simultaneously appalled to see Voight in the supposedly-awful American Carol. I think he plays George Washington giving the Michael Moore character a sanctimonious tour of Ground Zero. Voight seems to have gone off the deep end a bit, politically, what with his hysterical editorial this past summer (then again, it's a hysteria which seems to be spreading, given the bloodthirsty crowds at McCain rallies). Where's the anaconda when you need it (I kid Jon).
Really fantastic look back at this movie that should be appreciated for all the reasons you mention, chief among them its lack of pretension. A different director might have tried to make this an actually scary horror movie, but instead it exists as one of the last great B movies.
I never knew that Voight took such pleasure in his character, but it's a lot of fun to watch so I shouldn't be surprised.
I didn't see the sequel to this for fear that it would somehow try to right wrongs that didn't exist in the first. Also, this movie's success is primarily because of the cast, as you mention, and without that the sequel is probably best left for late-night cable.
"One of the last great B movies"
Interesting statement. I haven't followed up on enough under-the-radar movies of the past few years to know if this is true, but it certainly seems to be. I wonder why. Is it the over-prominance of CGI now? (Today all of Anaconda would be digitally tweaked, and its style would probably be slicker.) I'd say it's the fact that B movies get the life sucked out of them by A budgets and smug publicity campaigns, but that was already going on in the 90s too.
Yes, I never saw the sequel either. For a revealing comparison of 90s and 00s ethos, look at the un-ironic (except in Voight's playful performance, which seems like an unintended surprise and is all the better for being surrounded by sincerity and straightforwardness) Anaconda vs. the aren't-we-so-ironic Snakes on a Plane, whose winking knowledge of its own campiness led to a marketing campaign so smug the damn movie's popularity peaked before anyone had even seen it (I still haven't, by the way).
Wow, yes of course, Snakes on a Plane is exactly what Anaconda would be in 2009 - terrible (I did see it, in a theater no less). But yet they both exist as B movies and both have their fans. Like you I've become significantly more selective with what I watch since 1997, but there have been few B movies since then that make me wonder if I'm missing anything. Of course when they're bad, like Snakes on a Plane, then it just cements my admiration for Anaconda.
Although it does feature Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight and Owen Wilson, Anaconda feels much closer to the actual level of those B-movies, rather than an attempt to graft some of their more recognisable elements onto a summer blockbuster. All the elements are there, from the dodgy set-up to the poor special effects (the CGI looks terrible) to the contrived and arbitrary conclusion. In the same way that The Expendables felt more like an actual crap eighties action movie, rather than a nostalgic throwback to one, Anaconda feels like a proper B-movie, rather than a more conventional movie with similar elements.
It\u2019s one of those movies that is extremely 90s, especially as it was released during a time when major studios had the technology to render CGI monsters and other spectacles, but they simply could not avoid making them look terrible. (I find these dated effects charming in many cases, though.)
There\u2019s another thing about Anaconda that is incredibly dated, but I do not find it charming, except as fodder to dissect in a medium such as this. I\u2019m referencing, of course, Jon Voight\u2019s attempt at portraying a Paraguayan man.
(I could\u2019ve stopped that sentence at \u201CJon Voight,\u201D of course. But we don\u2019t need to get into all that here in my newsletter. [Unless one of you decides to pay for extra Voight content].)
If it\u2019s been a while since you\u2019ve seen Anaconda (I know you\u2019ve seen it), Voight plays a river tracker named Paul Serone. As he tells the crew, he was studying to become a priest, but he \u201Cneeded to see the real world.\u201D (He says this right before chopping up a large fish.) He also says that his calling is \u201Csnakes,\u201D which is\u2026diametrically opposed to the priesthood in a fascinating way, now that I think about it.
As you know, there\u2019s a rich tradition in the film industry of not knowing (or caring, perhaps?) how to portray people of other ethnicities on screen. It can be difficult to look back at Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age knowing that its actors (mostly white men, of course) simply donned shoe polish or bronzer rather than hiring actors of color. There\u2019s a context to it, but our modern brains have been conditioned to reject such images on sight.
Here\u2019s the thing: Anaconda, as you may have guessed, does not belong to Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age. It belongs to 1997, a time when America\u2019s first Black president was enjoying a second term in office. A time when, quite frankly, studios should have known better.
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