Anacondas: Trail Of Blood (2009)

JUNE 18, 2009

GENRE: CRAP, PREDATOR
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Those who follow me on Twitter already know the tragedy that struck today when I opened my DVD of Argento’s Four Flies On Grey Velvet. Namely, the disc inside was some documentary about babies. So I reported the disc as “having a problem” and brought it to my nearest Blockbuster to trade in for an actual horror movie. Making matters worse, all I could find was Anacondas: Trail Of Blood, which is the first film in the series to actually have characters return, but offers absolutely nothing else. Settling for a goddamn Anaconda sequel when you wanted to be watching an Argento film is like Megan Fox canceling a date with you so you spend the night pleasuring yourself to a Sears catalog instead.

As it was shot back to back with the last film, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised how lame it was - it’s the same fate that every “back half” back to back film pair has ever suffered (others include Pirates 3, Puppet Master 5, and Matrix Revolutions). But even then, it’s below par. For starters, more people are killed by gunfire than snakes, and the “good guys vs bad guys” stuff takes up so much of the movie, you could conceivably remove the snakes from the film entirely and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Even the finale is more concerned with two guys whaling on each other than a snake; after the two humans fight for about five minutes, the damn snake just shows up, eats the bad guy once he gets a chance to do so, and then Krystal Allen (the chick from the last one) blows it up with a grenade.

Speaking of Allen, she is still struggling with her one-liner delivery. Last time she said it too early, now she says it too late. The snake blows up, all of its bits fall to the ground, etc, and then finally, at LEAST 30 seconds later, she says something like “Regenerate from that!” (this time, the Blood Orchid stuff causes the snakes to regenerate; only destroying their major organs can kill them). Come on, woman, it only counts if he’s alive and you say it as you’re right about to kill him! Ask Dolph Lundgren for some pointers. She also has cinema’s most useless “If I’m not back in five minutes” line - she says it, merely goes into a shack to check on a bomb, and returns without incident about 60 seconds later.

Speaking of completely useless things, check out what I noticed: the even numbered films in this series are plural (Anacondas), but the odd numbered ones are not. Cool, huh? Nope, but it’s more interesting than this movie.

And, you know, all the usual complaints: the effects suck, the characters are wholly uninteresting (even Allen is boring this time around), etc. Plus, I’m getting pretty fucking sick of looking at the Romanian forest. Even the deaths are pretty dull, and it doesn’t help much that so many of them are completely pointless. At one point, Allen and a possible love interest/hero are running along, well out of the snake’s reach. But all the same, the guy stops running and tells Allen to “Run! Just go!”. She protests, he screams GOOOO!, she lingers a bit longer, and then finally leaves. Then he just stands there until the snake arrives and eats him. Allen then arrives at safety seconds later. Had he just kept running there would be no problem - safety was in close proximity and he had nothing slowing him down; his stopping simply made no sense at all.

Sony clearly doesn’t give a shit about the movie either. Whereas last time they at least put a trailer on there for fans to enjoy (a purely theoretical reason), they don’t even do that much this time around (note - when I looked for a trailer to put in the review, I discovered that they didn't really make one, just a teaser comprised of footage from Anaconda 2). Instead, they offer about a dozen trailers for some of their other, better movies, plus 12 whole chapter stops and a reminder that poor John Rhys-Davies is an Emmy nominated actor. I wonder if he thinks about that very often while he struggles to keep from nodding off while learning his lines on shitty things like this. I bet he does.

I should have just watched the baby documentary...

What say you?