Review

This one's hard to swallow

The abysmal Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid squeezes out any of the campy charm contained in the original Anaconda.

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid isn't good enough, or even bad enough, to qualify as worthwhile movie entertainment. It hovers in a frustrating limbo, often seeming on the verge of doing something really cool (or at least campy), yet never following through.

A certain charm can be found in movies that overextend themselves, hoping to disguise inadequacy with vitality (1997's Anaconda fits this category). A perverse charm can be discovered in movies that aren't as important as they proclaim themselves to be. Then there are movies such as Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, which fail in both ways and aren't charming at all.

The movie has little in common with its predecessor. This time it's a river trek in Borneo where anacondas don't reside, the first clue that four screenwriters (!) are clueless. A pharmaceutical company has learned that a rare flower, blooming once every seven years, may unlock the secrets of eternal life. A boatload of snake snacks embarks on an expedition to find it.

There's Dr. Jack Byron (Matthew Marsden), whose greed keeps everyone else in danger. There's Samantha "Sam" Rogers (British actor KaDee Strickland), who's always in danger of forgetting her bogus Southern accent. Cole Burris (Eugene Byrd) and Gordon Mitchell (Morris Chestnut) play both depressing sides of the African-American coin in terror flicks: the former as eye-popping, squealing sidekick to the latter's black superman. Salli Richardson-Whitfield was hired to play the aptly named Gail Stern because she looks a bit like Jennifer Lopez, who starred in Anaconda and hasn't looked back.

Then there's Han Solo, or rather Bill Johnson, a grumpy, hunky boat captain played by someone named Johnny Messner a Clive Owen look-alike who's positively stuck on himself. Each of his macho moves is calculated to a numbing degree, posing himself as the unattainably perfect male. The most interesting thing about Messner is the ruckus raised by his recent comments on the Cinema Confidential Web site (www.cinecon.com) declaring himself as the only real man in Hollywood, dissing Orlando Bloom, Vin Diesel, Russell Crowe - practically anyone who lands acting jobs he can't. It's going to be fun watching this guy implode.

The snake effects are perhaps the only thing that computer animation hasn't improved upon since 1997. We don't see much of the enormous reptiles until the final 15 minutes, anyway. By then we just want everybody eaten so the credits can roll. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid might be a decent late-night distraction on somebody else's cable TV, so you don't have to pay for it there, either.

Grade: D

Director: Dwight Little

Cast: Johnny Messner, KaDee Strickland, Matthew Marsden, Morris Chestnut, Eugene Byrd, Nicholas Gonzalez, Salli Richardson-Whitfield

Screenplay: John Claflin, Daniel Zelman, Michael Miner, Ed Neumeier

Rating: PG-13; violence, profanity, scary images

Running time: 98 min.

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