[Inspector Abberline]

Anaconda (1997, USA / Brazil / Peru)

In the big rubbery snake genre ,Anna Karenina er um Anaconda is pretty much the daddy of them all,boasting a rather impressive cast of nearly A-list actors,with Jon Voight nearly out acting the snake in the baddie department.Jennifer Lopez ,Ice Cube and Owen Wilson are making a nature documentary about a lost tribe in the Amazon,(yes this film does indeed boast some ludicrous casting) with Eric Stoltz as lead scientist.Not for getting a young looking Danny Trejo,if that is at all possible.While Anaconda is definitely a fun creature feature it does suffer from taking it self to seriously at times,with Lopez only proving she is no Sigourney Weaver in the tough female stakes and Ice Cube,well just being Ice Cube.As for the snake in question,well at times he looks like a rather realistic rubbery giant monster,and at other times it looks like a rather shit CGI rubbery snake like the kind you would buy in a toy shop.And maybe this is why the snake does not get as much screen time as the rather insidious Jon Voight and his rather unconvincing Portuguese accent,Mr Voight does all manner of emoting and to say that he chews the amazon scenery would be the understatement of the decade,how did such a marvellous actor end up churning out such rubbish,see also DeNiro and Dennis Hopper.In fact Voight did at times remind me of DeNiro's Max Cady from Cape Fear,seemingly indestructible neanderthal man,well up until he is swallowed by a bloody great snake that is. Not as entertaining as Snakes on a Plane,and nowhere near as good as the other giant creature flick like Alligator and Lake Placid,Anaconda is a decent enough entry in the monstrously big animal versus humans,although I was wishing throughout that Lopez would get eaten.#