Attack of the flying burning snakes
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Red Orchid (2004): 4 out of 10: I had the following criticisms of the first Anaconda. How did the snakes get to the Amazon when they live hundreds of miles away in the Ecuadorian swamps, man those CGI snakes look fake, and you know what this movie is missing? Some racist comic relief, you know, with the scaredy-cat black guy who follows Bob Hope around looking for ghosts. Well, they answered my third concern.
The anacondas are still in the jungle now the filmmakers have now moved them to Borneo, which is in Asia, which seems a rather large slither from the swamps of Ecuador, in South America. It’s kind of like finding tigers in Africa. (Perhaps the snakes escaped from a zoo.)
The snakes look okay while underwater, but fail miserably while airborne. Most snakes don’t do flying well. (Though that would explain their intercontinental migration.) The snake doesn’t even really look right and the effects guys in the extras admit it is a combination of many snakes. (This must explain the fangs and why anacondas in the movie are flammable.) Apparently, real anacondas don’t have the right ‘tude.
With English accented villains, ship crushing waterfalls and paralyzing spiders, the movie comes awfully close to not needing the snakes at all. (This is my The Amityville Horror Part II rule. In which the family was so awful a haunted house seemed redundant)
As for the actors, only two stand out Morris Chestnut as the horrible and embarrassing black comic relief and the monkey who is by far the best actor in the film and definitely needs a new agent. I’m serious. The monkey has a Jack Nicholson Five Easy Pieces breakout performance.
Another helpful hint, if one is lost in the jungles of Borneo, do not build a raft to Kota Bharu like the characters in the movie do. It is about a thousand kilometers of open ocean away as the anaconda flies.
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