![]() ![]() Which, to be fair, you can bait most predators with blood, but the implication is clearly that you need chum to catch an anaconda, which contradicts things we've already seen. Later on, a pool of blood is used as bait. ![]() At one point, the anaconda's presence is marked by the displacement of so much water that it causes two-foot waves to bob up and down. This is going to persist throughout the movie, you understand. think that anacondas are basically sharks. But all I could think was: it bursts through the floorboards? How? And this is where we learn, nice and early, that director Luis Llosa and screenwriters Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr. Rather than be devoured by the thing, the poacher shoots himself, which is meant to be our first sign that whatever this ferocious 40-foot regurgitating nightmare is, death itself is preferable. The film starts us out by revealing one of the many, many stupid habits it will be unable to break over the next hour and a half, with a scene of a poacher (Danny Trejo, who was big enough by this point that I imagine this counts as a "cameo" and not just a "small role") on a boat in the Amazon being menaced by an unseen something that bursts through the floorboards. And thus it is in 1997 that we arrive at this most '90s of bad genre films, its period specificity surpassed maybe only by the magnificent decade-capping Deep Blue Sea, which adds genetic engineering and Samuel L. Add in the brief flourishing of environmentalism at the start of the decade, and the particular character of those creatures features - all about the danger of humans mucking about in untouched corners of the world and damaging animals, maybe set in the rain forest if you're feeling especially straightforward - starts to calcify. Monster movies were a particular beneficiary of this moment in history: I imagine this is probably thanks to the gargantuan success of Jurassic Park in 1993, which modeled a way of marrying animatronics with the new-fangled toy of CGI, and re-ignited the audience's taste for old-school adventure tales of man versus toothy beast. The film is one of the highlights of what looks, over two decades later, like the last Golden Age of so-bad-it's-good cinema. Make an idle claim like that at the start of your movie and you've already won the rapt attention of every genre movie junkie who will happily wait through a nice trim running time (and at 89 minutes including credits, Anaconda might very well have the most correct running time of any movie ever made) to find out who, exactly, will be getting regurgitated and re-eaten. ![]() The point is that we're here to watch a late-'90s creature feature, and feeding those lines to a B-movie fan is like throwing a big slab of raw beef into a school of piranhas. They will regurgitate their prey in order to kill and eat again.It is not clear to me that anything in any of those three sentences is correct, including the capital B in "Basin". Unique among snakes, they are not satisfied after eating a victim. Anaconda begins with a text crawl so deliriously full of bullshit that I cannot possibly resist quoting it in full: Tales of monstrous, man-eating Anacondas have been recounted for centuries by tribespeople of the Amazon Basin, some of whom are said to worship these giant snakes.Īnacondas are among the most ferocious – and enormous – creatures on earth, growing, in certain cases, as long as 40 feet.
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