The plot devices it throws up are ridiculous – characters stung by wasps that have been placed in scuba masks barriers (for no reason ever explained) placed across the river and then being dynamited and raining the barge with snakes. It has the feel of a script that should have been made as a cheap B movie but that ended up taking itself too seriously and somehow obtaining a $50 million budget. However, the film itself collapses into the frequently laughable. Peruvian director Luis Llosa, who also made the B-budget sf film Crime Zone (1989) and the underrated Sylvester Stallone action vehicle The Specialist (1994), does a competent job with the suspense. Jennifer Lopez in one of her first major starring roles The film’s most novel variation on Jaws is the turning of Robert Shaw’s Great White Hunter, played here by Jon Voight, into a character that stands ambiguously between a savant who has knowledge about the situation and outright psychopath. Although in the end, Anaconda has the problem of most CGI films in that it cannot help but remind you that they are just CGI shots.

The CGI and animatronic snake effects are good, with some impressive shots of the anaconda swimming past the camera with the shape of a half-devoured body pressing out of its gullet views from down inside its throat and a breathtaking shot where it unfolds in mid-air down the length of a waterfall to catch a falling victim. (Although, with its enclosed boatboard Amazonian setting, the film comes closer to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) than it does to Jaws). Anaconda is fairly much an attempt to make a CGI version of Jaws – with snakes instead of sharks. After Jurassic Park we saw a whole host of monster movies being redressed with CGI effects, including the likes of Deep Rising (1998), Godzilla (1998), Mighty Joe Young (1998), Bats (1999), Deep Blue Sea (1999), Lake Placid (1999), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), King Kong (2005) and Snakes on a Plane (2006), as well as numerous efforts down the B-budget end of the spectrum as the effects became cheaper to produce with the likes of King Cobra (1999), Komodo (1999), Octopus (2000), Python (2000), Spiders (2000), Fangs (2001), New Alcatraz/Boa (2002), Boa vs Python (2004), Frankenfish (2004), Attack of the Sabretooth (2005), Cerberus (2005), Mansquito (2005), Pterodactyl (2005), Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006), Mammoth (2006) and Minotaur (2006).Īnaconda was one of the first of this new breed of CGI monster movies to come out. This revival started out with the likes of Arachnophobia (1990) and Tremors (1990) but did not begin to take off it was not until the success of Jurassic Park (1993). The 1990s seemed to bring on a revival of the 1970s Nature’s Revenge cycle as originally popularised by films such as The Birds (1963), Willard (1971) and Jaws (1975).

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