04/11/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Anaconda
'Anaconda' wraps you in horror and hilarity

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer. A Columbia picture written by Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., directed by Luis Llosa. Rated PG-13, contains violence. Running time: 90 minutes.

Before I went to see Anaconda, I wondered whether Jon Voight had ever imagined himself being billed third in a movie, behind Ice Cube.

But don't worry, Voight fans. It doesn't matter.

Voight steals every scene he's in in Anaconda, even when he's going head to head with the 40-foot-long monster snake -- out-grimacing, out-eye rolling, outrageous! It's as though Voight were trying to go for the Wackiest Character in the Jungle Award, which last year was won hands down by Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

With a ponytail, a vaguely South American accent (he says he's from Paraguay) and looking fitter than he has in years, Voight plays a snake poacher (though "poaching is illegal," he advises insincerely) who hooks a ride down the Amazon on a barge hired by a documentary movie crew. They're looking for a lost tribe known as the People in the Mist; he's looking for King Conda.

Anaconda is a trashy, juicy, often zany and sometimes heart-pounding thriller that combines elements of Jaws, Alien and, especially, Creature from the Black Lagoon. I haven't seen this many barriers put up along the Amazon to thwart a boat's progress -- fallen trees, housing debris, even a gate -- since the Creature plied these waters in the 1954 classic.

The script is a B-movie rip-off of those other films, but on its own terms. With its surprises, Voight's lunatic performance and some truly spectacular special effects -- like a snake grabbing and coiling around a victim who's in mid-air falling over a cliff -- Anaconda is wildly entertaining. It's like a bunch of old Saturday matinee serials cobbled together.

When someone falls into the Amazon or says the fateful lines -- "I'll be right back" -- or turns to see why that ominous music is suddenly welling up on the soundtrack, we get nervous. But Peruvian-born director Luis Llosa, who had a string of B-movies until hitting paydirt with The Specialist starring Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone, toys with us. That ominous music more often than not is NOT signaling the anaconda's arrival . . . at least not yet. Those people who say they'll be right back, just might be . . . at least this time.

Most of the characters are one-dimensional tossaways. A few are so annoying that you wish they'd be snake bait sooner than later. The only question here is in what order they'll become the anaconda's snack.

Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube are top-billed, but neither has much to build on besides looking terrified. They're surprisingly flat at first, only getting much to do late in the film when the snake comes calling. The usually good Eric Stoltz is decommissioned early in Anaconda and remains that way for much of it. Jonathan Hyde has a few good, but predictable moments as the cynically superior Brit on board who's the documentary film's narrator.

So leave it to Voight to grab the vacant center stage, which he does with relish. Voight's poacher, Paul Sarone, seems to be playing a private joke on the people aboard the barge, looking sinister as he slowly pushes for the moment when he's in charge. A scene in which he's seen at the boat's wheel, looking like the king of the world, is amusing. He's a larger than life figure, which makes the kind of eye-rolling shenanigans Voight pulls for the camera fit the gargantuan image he's projecting. When someone asks Sarone whether he'd like to go into the jungle to look for a man they fear is a snake victim, he blithely passes with a breezy "Some other time." In a smaller film, he'd merely be ridiculous. Here we both laugh at him and with him.

There's only nervous laughter at the sight of the anaconda, however, a wriggling mass that leaps from the water and slithers onto the boat deck, coiling itself around and spinning its victim in a suffocating dance of death.

No gruesome detail is spared in this funhouse of a movie. At one point Llosa mischievously gives us a view of the snake slithering through the water, its body bulging with the outline of a just-swallowed victim, a strange view that begs laughter. At another we're treated to a gullet-eye view from inside the snake as a victim is swallowed whole, a victim who'll later be regurgitated and eaten again as promised (warned?) in the film's opening credits.

This is squirmy filmmaking that's hilarious and scary and grisly, all at the same time.