Two Bits

Anaconda is the type of movie that helps you understand what makes good movies good. This is not because Anaconda is good, since it isn’t. It’s utterly atrocious, bad in a way you can’t blame on age. Characters without character, a monster following illogical rules, bad special effects, nonsensical plot, lack of tension – its as if the director found the checklist for making a bad horror movie and took care to hit every item on the list. But is it really the movie, or is it just me?

I remember watching Jaws not that long ago, and I remember feeling tense, if not scared. But Jaws had a few things Anaconda doesn’t – things the latter, by rights, could very well have. The biggest one for me is the monster, in both cases an overgrown, people-eating freak of nature. But the snake isn’t that big. Certainly, it isn’t big enough to need to eat a fully grown adult more than once a week. Yet, in the space of three days (as near as I can tell), it consumes no less than three people and a panther. Evidently, the snake possesses a metabolism of diabolic origins.

This idea worked in Jaws because of several reasons (if I remember right). For one, great lengths of time pass in between the attacks, days if not weeks. For another, the shark is absolutely enormous. The snake in Anaconda is large – probably large enough to eat a human (snakes really are fascinating predators) – but not so large as to need to consume so much food.

So, rule number one for making a horror movie about a killer animal: make sure the animal is killing for a good reason. That makes it scary. Tell me a story about a killer snake that eats a full-sized animal every day, or pursues prey even when it’s still digesting its last meal, and I’ll know immediately you’re telling me fiction. Part of the horror of Jaws is its believability. Anaconda has none of it.

The one really amazing part of the movie is Jon Voight’s performance. I had to Youtube his name halfway through the film just to reassure myself that his acting in this movie was an act and not his real personality. If the rest of the actors had approached their roles with the seriousness that Voight did, I could see myself finding the movie a great deal more horrifying – absurdly maliciousness snake or not.