ANACONDA (1997)

A sweaty group of nerds take a boat down the Amazon River in order to make a documentary about a long-lost indigenous Amazonian tribe.  Along the way, they make the wise choice of picking up a hitchhiker. This dude immediately starts talking hella mad shit.  Then before you can ask “How the fuck has HBO still not discovered Robert McCammon?”, there’s a big ass computer-generated snake floating around eating people.

I remember seeing ANACONDA in the theater back in 1997 and being severely disappointed at how bland, weak and soulless it was. It hasn’t gotten any better with age.  Zero blood, zero gore, zero nudity, zero tension.  Just a bunch of actors running around some crappy-looking boat collecting a paycheck.  The idea of a large killer snake hunting humans is ripe with entertaining possibilities, but none of them are present here.

For some misguided reason I thought it would be fun to revisit ANACONDA for a review. Maybe I was too young to enjoy it back in 1997?  Maybe it’d be fun to giggle at?  Nope. Instead, I just sat there dumbfounded that it was even worse than I remember it being. Shit script, Danny Trejo’s name in the opening credits even though he dies during the opening scene and only has around 1:22 minutes of screentime, bland colours, bland acting, bland cinematography, bland action scenes, bland special effects, bland dialogue…you know what?  Fuck this movie, fuck this review.  I’ve already wasted too much time on this stinky bowel movement. Watch it if you want, maybe you and your friends will get some laughs out of it. Just don’t expect a good movie.

[Note: As I was proofreading this review, I noticed that today is April 11 and ANACONDA was released 26 years ago today on April 11, 1997. Happy birthday, you boring piece of fuck.]

Part 2 - Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004)
Part 3 - Anaconda 3: Offspring (2008)
Part 4 - Anacondas: Trail of Blood (2009)
Part 5 - Lake Placid vs. Anaconda (2015)

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (1978)

I've gotta be the wrong audience for this one. For as much as I love old made-for-TV movies (especially from the late 1970's / early 1980's) and enjoy both Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin, I never even laughed once during this "comedy".  Or even came close to smiling.  The entire story is fucking ridiculous and makes no sense.  A single income family (working husband, stay-at-home mother and three children) live in a small apartment in New York City, so, to make their lives better, they move to the suburbs.  Alright, nothing wrong with that, that happens all the time.  Problem is once these idiots move into the house that they had built to their specifications, they automatically somehow still don't have enough room!  And now, the mom (and aspiring writer), who is left home alone during the day time, is forced to set up her small foldout table and typewriter in the garage!  Dude, you have an entire two-floor, multiple bedroom house all to yourself...why are you out typing in the garage?  At the same time, the father complains non-stop about how far away he is from the office and how the commute is killing him.  Well, fuckface, why did you move so far away?  Naturally, to simplify their lives, they adopt a large dog.

There's tons of other anti-funny things going on in this movie like the hilarious moment when the garbage disposal kicks up something and Carol runs across the kitchen and jumps up on the counter or the whole side-splitting subplot about Carol's emotional support relationship with a local stay-at-home dad or the disturbing (I mean knee-slapping) time when the youngest child puts a sign in the back window of the station wagon saying he's being kidnapped! Good times.

Vintage cars, wacky dog montage, a long drawn out scene about the importance of life insurance, Eric Stoltz underused, that one kid from AIRPLANE!, dead script, average acting, unsatisfying ending that didn't resolve anything!  As negative as this review is (and it damn sure is), I'm actually fascinated by this entire movie and why it was even made.  Like what was the point?  Who knows.  I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that love it and laugh their testicles off watching Charles Grodin dump fertilizer on Carol Burnett's typewriter.  I'm not one of them.  

Also, did houses in the suburbs back in 1978 actually have septic tanks?  And in the front yard of all places!  This movie is set in a large, planned suburb outside of NYC (although it looks suspiciously like a pre-POLTERGEIST Simi Valley, California to me), you'd think it would have the infrastructure for a combined sewage system.