ANACONDA

If Hollywood continues its present trend, soon there won’t be any children’s nightmare fantasies left to exploit. One by one, Hollywood is plumbing the depths of these fantasies, from giant tornadoes (TWISTER), to giant dinosaurs (JURASSIC PARK), and now, giant snakes (ANACONDA). One day, there won’t be any more children’s nightmare topics left unexplored.

ANACONDA tells the story of an ill-fated anthropology expedition to document the existence of stone-age Shirishama Indians in the tropical wilderness of Brazil’s Amazon Basin. Naturally, the Shirishama Indians worship snake idols.

University anthropologist Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz), gathers a hopelessly naïve documentary film crew to get footage of the Shirishamas: documentary director Terri Flores (Jennifer Lopez); cameraman Danny (Ice Cube); pompous English narrator Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde); and, soundmixer Gary (Owen Wilson). This eclectic crew marshals its resources on a tellingly rickety Amazon River boat at a staging site near the mouth of the mighty and mysterious river.

No sooner does the expedition begin to wend its scenic way up the huge two-mile wide Amazon River to beautiful symphonic music, than it encounters enigmatic, stranded Brazilian riverman Paul Saron (Jon Voight), who assures the gullible academics that he has seen the elusive Shirishama Indians and can lead them to them. They make the mistake of picking him up. The mysterious, menacing Saron resembles Marlon Brando’s murderous jungle sociopath in APOCALYSE NOW. A failed former Catholic priest postulant, he says he catches snakes, but he fails to inform them that he harbors a hidden obsession to capture a lethal 40-foot Anaconda alive. He also fails to tell them that he will sacrifice anything to get his snake.

Saron makes a graphic appeal to juvenile imaginations. Shortly after he boards the boat and rescues Cale and Flores from a wild boar attack, he tells her: “An Anaconda has heat sensors. A warm body is not hard to find. It strikes, wraps around you, holds you tighter than your true love, and you get the privilege of hearing your bones break, before the power of its embrace causes your veins to explode. Then it swallows you whole.” Not missing a beat, a curious teenager in the audience would probably exclaim: “Oh, I wonder what it feels like to slide into the snake’s belly?”

Of course, anticipating this exact juvenile question, ANACONDA’S filmmakers depicted the hollow-tube-like belly of the snake just before the bad guy gets ingested. They even lit it for the audiences’ more thorough visual digestion. Later, they add the thrill of witnessing the snake regurgitate the now-slimy Saron, which the snake apparently couldn’t stomach. Covered in digestion slime but still not dead, (the producer says that she had to hire special slime and gunk personnel), Saron caps off the scene with a leering wink at the surviving crew members, who shrink back in cinematic horror.

The climactic man versus anaconda fight scene occurs in an abandoned mining warehouse, much like the climactic fight between the little boy and girl against the raptors in JURASSIC PARK. As in JURASSIC PARK, the antagonist himself distracts the attacking beasts to divert their attention from the helpless humans.

A cross between THE AFRICAN QUEEN and APOCALYPSE NOW, ANACONDA is a entertaining movie, if for no other reason than that it offers an exotic Amazonian jungle respite from mundane routines. This is an epic movie, depicting man against nature, with surprisingly few profanities and little implied sex. The scenery is gorgeous, the music superb, and the acting competent. However, beware of lots of snake attack violence, which may repel some viewers. Finally, beware of associating the obsessed, evil riverman, Saron, with the Catholic Church, in which he claims to have once been a candidate for the ordination. Such an association may offend Christian audiences, who are fed up with films depicting renegade clergymen.