Film is Pwn

I may be the only person man enough to say it, but I firmly believe that Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is a far superior film to the Jennifer Lopez classic Anaconda.  Okay, so this isn’t exactly a controversial or a topical assertion, but I’m not backing down from my opinion regardless of how insipid or uninteresting it may be.

Please don’t take this as an attack on Anaconda, as I have the utmost respect for that movie with its notable performances of Jon Voight as an evil hunter which he brilliantly overplays as the Spanish Dracula (“I vant to hunt your snake, blah!”); Owen Wilson basically acting like Owen Wilson before anyone knew who Owen Wilson was; and Ice Cube finally proving once and for all that he has technically been in a movie. 

But come on, people!  Anaconda had the rather flimsy premise of a National Geographic crew going to film a giant snake before most of them are eaten by said giant snake.  But Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid?  THIS is what movies are about people! 

This movie isn’t about people going to photograph snakes, it’s about people HUNTING for the flippin’ Blood Orchid, people!  What is the Blood Orchid, you may ask?  Why it’s the key to immortality, of course!  It’s a flower that blooms in some remote region of Borneo for only a couple of weeks every seven years, so it’s basically a combination of the botanical Halley’s Comet and the movie science from Deep Blue Sea that taught the world that the cure to Alzheimer’s disease was in mutating giant sharks. Anyhoo, our heroes are off to find the Blood Orchid for the betterment of the human race as well as to make themselves billionaires, naturally.  You have to respect these people, as, after all, Indiana Jones never had the audacity to raid the Blood Orchid, but this cast of genereotypes (generic stereotypes, copyright pending) has the proverbial stones to do it. 

Here’s a fun tip: If you’re looking for an office pool to fill the void left by March Madness, show the first thirty minutes of this movie and then take bets on the characters that die (and in what order) and which ones live.  Your bracket is: (the higher the ranking the more likely to survive)

1 Seed: Sam!  She’s a spunky, Southern gal with whose Southerness comes and goes.  She’s ranked most likely to survive simply because she’s kind of cute.  Plus, Sam rebuffs the advances of creeps Ben and Jack, and if Scream has taught us nothing else it’s that girls like that do well in scary movies.

2 Seed: Bill!  Bill is played by Johnny Messner, who is kind of like the American version of Jean Claude Van Damme, except he doesn’t do any kickboxing and he has no accent, which pretty much makes him an empty vessel.  Still, Bill is clearly the movie’s Han Solo, hired in a seedy Borneo cantina to transport them to the Blood Orchid against his better judgment in the rainy season (sealing his Han Solo status is the Millennium Falcon-esque treatment of his crappy boat).  Oh, and he wrestles a crocodile that behaves suspiciously like a rodeo machine in some country bar in order to establish that he’s cool.

3 Seed: Gordon!  Gordon is the good, evil scientist on the expedition and is played by an actually talented actor in Morris Chestnut, who, if his career goes (further) down the drain already has an ideal name if he chooses to make adult movies. 

4 Seed: Tran!  Tran is Bill’s Chewbacca, the only local in the movie who gets a single line of dialogue, and some of them are actually somewhat amusing though there is a large gap between them.  Despite being rather entertaining, Tran adds nothing to the movie so he’s pretty doggone expendable.

5 Seed: Cole!  Cole is intended to be the comedic relief, though he only succeeds in being quite loud and panicky. 

6 Seed: Gail!  Gail is a skeptic about the miraculous merits of our precious Blood Orchid (the audacity!!) and a bit of a highly-strung witch.  Despite all that, I think the audience is supposed to like her, which we don’t. 

7 Seed: Ben! Ben is a creep, which is pretty much his only character trait.  He quickly discovers that if you infringe on John Williams’ Jaws theme, his lawyers will unleash a giant Anaconda to kill you.  If you read that sentence carefully, you may find a big clue in filling out your bracket.

8 Seed: Jack!  Jack is the evil, evil scientist, which is rather obvious as soon as you realize he’s British.  Jack betrays his expedition mates to find the Blood Orchid, so he is left to fill Jon Voight’s rather imposing shoes as foreigny villain dude with an accent, except it’s a real accent.  Jack very quickly goes from ambitious to homicidal maniac, which is understandable, because, as previously mentioned, he’s British.  Failing to learn from Jon Voight’s mistake, Jack ties up our heroes as snake bait but is instead eaten by the snake, just like Hispacula himself.

I’m excluding the exasperating little monkey named “Kong” who is Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid’s answer to Jar Jar Binks, i.e. an extremely annoying character you wish would get eaten by the flippin’ snake.  There are no less than THREE false alarm/boo! moments supplied by this stupid monkey, each one more irritating than the last.

But all that is a minor quibble compared with the educational value of this movie.  For instance, I learned the following from only one viewing of Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid:

  Giant, fifty foot, CGI anacondas are able to move freely just beneath the surface of the water without any ripples being produced.
 One hundred and five pound, tiny Southern gals are capable of chopping off the head of an anaconda with only one swing of a machete.  The natives shown hunting in the beginning of the film just run and get eaten, but they are certainly not the level of hunter/warrior of your average American hottie.
 Despite heading up river, it is still possible to run into a waterfall.
 Even if your movie takes place in the depths of the jungles of Borneo, it is still possible to work in some product placement (mmm, I feel like a Coca-Cola, anyone else?).

Still, being a lover of cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movies, I feel like an authority on the subject when I say that Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is the best of the bunch.  You question me? Who else among you has actually sat down and watched Python (starring Casper Van Dien), Python II (starring no one), Boa (with Dean Cain), Boa vs. Python, Snake King (featuring Stephen Baldwin forever damaging The Usual Suspects in my mind), and King Cobra (poor Pat Morita), and Snakes on a Train (not a joke, well, a joke but a real movie). 

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is by far the best movie with one or more giant snakes mutated somehow (maybe they ate a BLOOD ORCHID!), a hot chick who is more than likely some kind of doctor, a hunky expert dude, a human villain (maybe someone BRITISH!) who ties up the heroine to serve up to the snake(s) but is instead devoured himself.  This is cinema at its finest, people!   If Hitchcock had access to cheap, CGI technology, he’d have been making The Snakes, not the Birds, you’d better believe it!

DJR