My original plan for today was to cover Guillermo del Toro's Mimic, a movie about killer cockroaches in trench coats that seemed fascinating and terrifying. But then I discovered that Harvey Weinstein had interfered with that movie too. Mimic is sadly uninteresting and disappointing.
So I called an audible and instead went with Anaconda, directed by Luis Llosa, a movie with no ambitions to be anything other than stupid fun. This is also also a milestone for us in that this is the very first movie we're covering that I saw in theaters. I was six-years-old, played hooky from Kindergarten, and my dad took me out to see Owen Wilson get eaten by a giant snake.
Anaconda is the biggest movie we've covered so far in this series. Not just in budget, which at $45 million might dwarf all the previous movies combined, but also in cast. In '97, Jennifer Lopez was not a household name just yet, but she would be superstar in just two years. Joining her is Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and as mentioned, Owen Wilson. Even the less famous people in this movie are Kari Wuhrer and Jonathan Hyde, who you'll definitely recognize at least if you've seen The Mummy or played Red Alert II. Eric Stoltz is here too, but spends most of Anaconda in a coma, so you'll forget he's even in this. The throw-away first victim of the giant snake is Machete himself, Danny Trejo.
Anaconda is as star-studded as horror movies get. Eating this cast is our title character, a big killer anaconda made out of what were then cutting-edge special effects. This movie made $136 million globally and inspired four sequels. So considering that Anaconda is as mainstream as it gets, is it any good?
And the answer, I'm happy to say, is yes. This is a fun time. It's what we needed after yesterday's bummer.
The first thing we need to talk about, because it is the thing you'll remember the most about Anaconda, is Jon Voight's accent. He plays Paul Serone, a leering snake-poacher and psychopath. I've met people from all over the world, and I still don't know what accent Jon Voight is supposed to have. Wikipedia's summary says he's supposed to be Paraguayan. Serone never speaks Spanish or Guarani, though he sometimes mutters in Latin. Even by the of the movie, Serone remains a total mystery, just a weird dude who spends most of the movie leering at the other cast members.
The rest of the cast are a crew of documentarians hunting for an indigenous civilization somewhere in the Amazon. (Never mind that this is a bad idea which will probably expose the natives to modern disease and exploitation, just run with it.) While sailing down the river, they come across a stranded hunter, our mystery man Serone. Serone takes charge and manipulates the voyage away from hunting natives and towards poaching snakes. Jonathan Hyde is impossibly British, I think he says "bloody" a dozen times. He's the one person who can get even close to Voight's ham levels. Still, Voight is off in his universe in Anaconda, usually only Marlon Brando could swing a movie to such wacky levels.
Now, does a bizarre accent and hammy performance ruin a movie? No! Jon Voight is fantastic in Anaconda, he makes the movie. He's got an intensity that nobody else can match. Anaconda is Paul Serone's movie, everybody else is just along for the ride, whether they like it or not. You might get eaten by the giant snake, or you might get a dead monkey spat in your face. Either way, Serone led you there.
Serone's partner in evil is, of course, the snake. It's a great monster. Anaconda works as a creature-feature. Not even special effects can match Voight's intensity, but the creature is massive and terrifying. There's a particularly great moment where a character is trapped on a cliff face, pinned by the snake, and tries to leap away to safety. Do they get away? Nope, the snake catches them mid-air. Curtains for that guy.
One thing I have not much discussed during this series is the massive revolution happening in special effects all through the 1990s. There have been tiny bits of computer generated effects here and there in the movies we've covered. Lord of Illusions had a lot of them, but made sure they looked other-worldly and unreal. Anaconda is our first movie to really bet hard on CG to convince an audience that a monster is eating Owen Wilson. And yeah, it's a 1997 movie, the CG is imperfect. However, when the snake is not in CG, it's a animatronic puppet. It looks fantastic. The effects are as good here as they are in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, also from '97. Anaconda's production combined the mediums of CG and practical effects in smart ways. Mostly, it holds up.
Anaconda is a movie that ends with a big-ass killer snake that is on fire chasing J-Lo across a river. It's that movie, it never stops being that movie. It's a high-adventure out in the jungle with kills, thrills, and ham. What more do you need?
Next time we reach 1998, the year of Bruce Willis and Aerosmith saving the Earth from a meteor the size of Texas, Bill Clinton's creepy behavior launching a political scandal the size of Texas, and our next movie, Ring AKA Ringu... which is not the size of Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment