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Friday, August 27, 2004
Watch out! You may find yourself enjoying dopey 'Anacondas'
Bad movies tend to fall into two categories. There are those bad in a way that's agonizing to endure (sadly, most movies these days) and there are those whose badness becomes a kind of charm, like so many of the low-budget sci-fi movies of the '50s or the work of Ed Wood.
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Happily, "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchard," falls into this latter category of cinematic failure. For all its improbable characters, wretched dialogue and stock situations, the movie has an earnest dumbness that sneaks up on you to be surprisingly entertaining.
For starters, it has nothing to do with "Anaconda," the 1997 giant-snake movie original set on an ill-fated boat trip down the Amazon. Indeed, this one takes place on the island of Borneo (although the filming took place on Fiji), in a hemisphere where (hey, no one told the screenwriters) Anacondas don't even exist.
The plot has a racially balanced expedition of attractive young people traveling up a jungle river in a race against time to find and harvest a rarely blooming orchard from which a miraculous anti-aging drug can be extracted.
Along the way, their ship is wrecked, their leader turns into a snarling villain, two of them get bitten by a spider that turns people to stone, and they find themselves being chased by a whole football team of anacondas that are each the size of Mexico.
The characters are absurdly shallow and one-note, the script is a formula joke and the direction is, to be kind, uninspired. You know a director is in trouble when he has to resort to the old "Tarzan" movie trick of constantly cutting to reaction shots of a cute monkey mascot.
On the other hand, "Anacondas" doesn't try to disguise its ineptitude under of an avalanche of sex jokes and scatology -- the usual refuge of a scoundrel movie in the new millennium. It's rated PG-13 but it's surprisingly clean.
It also isn't, like so many monster/animal movies, trying to be campy: Its tongue is nowhere near its cheek. Its appeal is that it takes itself very seriously, even if we can't, and 90 minutes of gently laughing at it is almost worth the price of admission.
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