It’s cold and relatively damp up here in South America.
My friends and I were enjoying a light camping trip deep in the jungles of Peru when, after day two, we found my buddy Truckee gnawed to death.
My camp quickly realized we were being hunted by something vicious… smart… terrifying… and, most of all, unstoppable.
The native chinchilla; nature’s fuzzy little bastard.
They strike like an unbelievably cute rider of death; to look into their lifeless, black eyes spells doom for anyone in the vicinity. They attack without mercy and escape into the shadows, wiggling their fuzzy little butts as they disappear into the dark void of the jungle.
After a few days of running and surviving, I find myself holed up is a rickety shack; the lone survivor of my group, writing quite possibly my last review and I have one VHS tape to watch:
1997’s Anaconda.
Fortunately, if there’s one thing I love, it’s animals fighting back movies.
Whether it be one of the many versions of Moby Dick, or Jaws, or even The Ghost and the Darkness I love them all. There’s something very menacing about a protagonist suddenly finding themselves firmly locked into the food chain; something that doesn’t happen too often in the modern world of today. The real drama is finding out if the human protagonist can use his or her brain to outsmart thousands of years of natural selection; can brain really beat brawn?
Anaconda was a relatively large-budgeted movie starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Owen Wilson, Eric Stoltz, Kari Wuhrer, Jonathan Hyde and featuring a young-ish Danny Trejo.
Well, featuring may be a little harsh; the dude dies in the first five minutes, but it is weird seeing him so young.
Lopez, Cube, Wilson, Stoltz, Wuhrer and Hyde are all members of a National Geographic-type film crew shooting in South America on the Amazon River. Unfortunately, they stumble upon a stranded Voight and decide to rescue him.
It’s at this point I should really give a hand to Jon Voight’s accent. Seriously, one cannot really pinpoint where he’s supposed to be from (Germany, Switzerland, South Africa?), but he really swings for the fences with it. He also manages to be incredibly creepy throughout. Like, not scary creepy; more ex-con turned Ice Cream Man with a smile that could give Charles Manson the heebie-jeebies.
Anyway, Voight is a big game hunter trying to find a legendary 40 foot long anaconda. He finagles his way into the camera crew and is able to enlist their help. As you can imagine, they get trapped out in the middle of nowhere and are hunted down until the protagonists are the lone survivors. As expected, Voight is killed by the snake (but makes a pretty hilarious short return) and Lopez is able to destroy the snake and escape. The movie itself is pretty cut-and-dry; however, there are a few reasons one may want to check out Anaconda.
The first, as mentioned above, is the cast. Besides Voight’s creep factor upped to 11, you have a motley crew of actors who end up having huge careers shortly after (save for Stoltz, who was a 90s darling but disappeared into the ether like a pack of blood-thirsty chinchillas after a feeding frenzy).
The second is the CGI. This movie really tried to capitalize on modern CG effects, spending nearly $100,000 dollars a second during any snake sequence that wasn’t filmed using practical effects.
Unfortunately, the damn thing really looks like a shitty Syfy channel movie, which is weird because Jurassic Park filmed four years earlier still hold up.
The third and most important is the sheer stupidity of this film. It really is the kind of movie one watches when under the influence and looking to leave their brain at home. Between “losing” floating fuel barrels to a calm river to over-the-top acting all around, it really is a sight to behold.
Overall, I recommend checking this one out if only to say, “I watched Anaconda and boy are my eyes tired.” It’s dumb, fast and entertaining.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make sure the cabin I’m trapped in is secure – those chinchillas really don’t know when to quit.
If you don’t hear from me in a few days, tell the editors and Forces of Geek that I loved them.
