Anaconda (1997)

Anaconda arrives from 1997, a year when a giant snake could still be sold as a good time. Luis Llosa directs a documentary crew up the Amazon, where Jon Voight's Paraguayan snake hunter hijacks the expedition and the animatronic title creature devours most of the supporting cast. The film is pulp, proudly and without apology. It wants nothing more than to frighten us with a large reptile and to let Voight chew scenery with an accent that earned him a Stinkers Award for Worst Fake Accent. That is the entire agenda, and it is delivered efficiently.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is a curious artifact. Jennifer Lopez anchors the cast as Terri Flores, the director who runs the expedition and eventually dispatches one of the snakes with a rifle, and Ice Cube appears as her cameraman, giving the production a diverse ensemble that would have been unremarkable in a drama and quietly notable in a monster movie. The film never remarks on any of it. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody learns a lesson about tolerance. The snake does not care about identity, and neither does the screenplay, which is focused entirely on who gets eaten next.

What remains is a lean creature feature with competent photography, a waterfall set piece, and a climax that sets an anaconda ablaze and launches it from a smokestack. It opened at number one, grossed handsomely, and collected six Razzie nominations, which is its natural habitat. In South Africa it has aired so often on e.tv that it became a national running joke. We are asked to take the cultural temperature of a film whose most progressive gesture is casting a Latina lead and a rapper in a movie about a snake. The thermometer reads room temperature. It is a silly, enjoyable, harmless piece of 1990s commerce, and there is a strange comfort in that.