When the obsessively driven Dr Cale hires a boat to track down an elusive tribe known only as the ‘people of the mist’ you know things are not going to end well. Along for the ride is his girlfriend and director Terri Flores who will document the journey with her camera man Danny. Things take a turn for the worst when Paul Sarone joins the expedition. Although they are unsure about him he offers to take them to the missing tribe, but in reality Sarone is hot on the trail of a giant anaconda...

Anaconda (1997 - 1 hr, 29 min, 20 sec) is another man against nature film from director Luis Llosa. One would have thought that with an experienced group of actors that the director could have produced something better than this limp B movie.

One of the perennial problems with film like this is whether the giant creature is convincing. I’m not sure that there are many modern audiences which would find a giant CGI snake scary and without that central support the whole thing come crumbling down. Once again we are forced to watch good actors struggle against a very poor script.

These films can work if they are done with the tongue firmly lodged in the cheek, but when they try to take themselves seriously their short comings are exposed to the glaring light of day. To keep the audience awake there is the requisite tensions between the crew but, to be honest, even these tensions do little to keep the audiences interest. Even the game of who will get killed, and how, is so heavily signposted that there is little fun to be had there.

The disc has BDlive but as yet no content, worst still there are no extras. The film is presented in English, French and German Dolby TrueHD 5.1 as well as four other European languages accompanied by subtitles in eighteen languages.

One would really have to be a lover of B movies to find much here that hasn’t been done before or done better, even given the increase in the quality of the picture. The film is worth watching for one unintentionally funny scene of a boat passing a water fall which is flowing upwards. This is the point where the laziness of the film really hits home.

4

Charles Packer