ANACONDA (41)

Directed by: Luis Llosa

Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz

The Pitch: Big nasty man-eating snake is on the loose. Behind you!

Theo Sez: Snakes are scary, primally so - they were scary even two thousand years ago, when the two serpents came out of the sea for Laocoon and his children in Virgil's "Aeneid" ; unfortunately, the one on view here is also a bit of a ham. Leaping across the screen in the peculiarly over-energetic way of computerised movie animals (see, e.g. JUMANJI ), swivelling its little snakey eyes from side to side and rearing up on its tail so it looks like the Loch Ness Monster, this may well be the silliest snake since Monty Python, and it's well-matched by the human heroes ranged against it - a documentary film crew searching for a lost Amazon tribe but behaving more like the randy teens in FRIDAY THE 13TH movies : "Is it just me," asks soundman Gary of production manager Denise, "or does the jungle make you really really horny?" ; "I think it's the jungle," she replies breathlessly. Disappointingly for a Bad Movie it does manage to get some basic-but-effective tension going in the first half, with the monster still unseen and the camera canting through 45 degrees to signify Extreme Danger ; mostly however - like Llosa's previous film, THE SPECIALIST - it's perched somewhere between genre and self-parody, not unentertainingly so. It's the kind of movie where, for all its strength and ferocity, the anaconda's main claim to fame (as gleefully explained in the opening titles) is the way it vomits up its prey after every meal so that it can eat it again. Ewwww!