Anaconda

This surprise hit is unpretentious and silly; it never forgets what it is –­­ a campy Jaws clone. A documentary film crew floats down the Amazon and runs into Jon Voight, enjoying himself to the hilt as a psycho obsessed with capturing the giant anaconda and bringing it back to civilization. The CGI snake looks fake, but that only adds to the fun (it’s endearingly fake-looking); so do Voight’s clownish accent and ridiculous dialogue (“I am not the bad guy. I did not eat the captain”). Voight also benefits from the best death scene (and subsequent, um, “resurrection”) any villain has gotten in recent years. A thoroughgoing beer-and-pizza drive-in movie, classic bad fun. The multicultural crew includes Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jonathan Hyde, Kari Wuhrer, and Eric Stoltz, who spends most of the movie in bed breathing through a pen in his larynx. Cinematography by Bill Butler (who shot Jaws); score by Randy Edelman. Director Luis Llosa is the guy who gave you Sandra Bullock nude in 1990’s Fire on the Amazon.

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