Flasz On Film

The fact that the 1997 Anaconda spawned a franchise is already a bit of a miracle. That this franchise includes three direct sequels, a made-for-SyFy crossover with the Lake Placid series and now a meta-reboot simply boggles the mind. On paper, the Luis Llosa-directed original starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz just didn’t have the legs you’d expect from a potent series progenitor. It was critically rinsed so profoundly that it nearly killed Llosa’s Hollywood career, who after transitioning from directing Corman-produced exploitation to helming more mainstream genre affairs like Sniper and The Specialist, was probably not too far from bagging a real big-budget gig.

But not only did Anaconda fail, it did so spectacularly and ended up on the year’s worst-of lists while also featuring prominently among Golden Razzie nominees. The one-two punch of The Specialist and Anaconda testing the limits of critics’ patience made sure that Llosa wouldn’t step behind the camera for another eight years.

But somehow, Anaconda became a cult item. Well, it made enough money to make sure that at least one sequel would follow. But much like most animal attack horrors, just because it was technically possible to make another movie in the series by sending another group of victims-to-be into the forest to be swallowed whole, spat out and eaten again by an angry snake that was sometimes animatronic and sometimes CGI, didn’t mean it was a good idea in the first place. Especially because there was very little else to hang the franchise on in the case of Anaconda.

In fact, its resurgence as a cult classic had very little to do with a critical reappraisal or a discovery of some thematic angle that made the movie look redeemable. It’s a clear-cut case of a so-bad-it’s-good cult appeal. There’s no other way to circumnavigate Jon Voight’s dialect work, the braindead plotting, severe deficiencies in suspense generation and even a single instance when the filmmakers decided to re-use a take and played it in reverse to have a scene in which the characters leave, never to return. Seeing water going up a waterfall is nothing short of mesmerizing and a testament to either how much of a mess the production of the movie was or how little care was given to the process of putting Anaconda together.

Therefore, the idea of staging a nostalgia-driven legacy sequel to Anaconda in the vein of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer or anything that could be separated from a corny subtitle like The Amazon Legacy with a colon would never work because the fanbase cheering for the return of Anaconda was likely not doing so out of a desire to see their favorite characters return to the jungle to wrestle a snake for old times’ sake, but rather out of a desire to see a terrible film in its natural habitat once more, doing terrible movie things. It would be ill-advised to treat the matter seriously, just as it would be a bad move to make a serious legacy sequel reigniting the Sharknado series. The way to resurrect this franchise required a reckoning with the fundamental truth that the 1997 original was an objectively abysmal movie that could only be loved ironically.

Which is exactly what happened. The 2025 resurrection of Anaconda is not a straight-up reawakening of the series or an attempt to pretend that the franchise carried enough cultural gravitas to warrant a bona fide legacy sequel. Instead, it is as tongue-in-cheek as they come. Cleverly enough and with appropriate doses of self-awareness infrequently bordering on camp ridiculousness, the new instantiation of the franchise sidesteps its own legacy and instead refocuses around the extraordinary cult following itself. The movie does not take place in the world of the movie, but rather in the world in which the movie Anaconda exists and where a bunch of childhood friends decide to make what turns out to be a completely unauthorized indie reboot of the franchise on the cheap.

In a way, this is the mechanism close to the one used by the original Scream sequels directed by Wes Craven. We do not worry about the characters played by Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz coming back to the fray because the actors playing themselves would be more likely to make an appearance. And two out of the three do. This sets the stage for a meta-comedy with some action and horror elements that lampoons the contents of the Anaconda franchise as much as it makes light of the idea of resurrecting 90’s properties, the dearth of originality in mainstream Hollywood or the intricacies of shooting movies on the cheap. It’s as though Tom Gormican and the gang looked at those 90’s sequels like Scream 2 and Scream 3, mixed in a few notes taken from American Movie and shaped everything to look like a Jack Black-starring action comedy vehicle that allows him to linger on his idiosyncrasies for long enough to gently press against the epiglottis of cringe.

As a result, this addition to the Anaconda series is by far the most interesting of the lot and perhaps the most intriguing structurally and thematically. This is a movie that frequently and lucidly traverses between multiple meta-dimensions in pursuit of finding a fun angle to have with the movie these folks were making, which turns the entire experience into something watchable and entertaining. Which is exactly what a movie like this needs to be. The idea of watching Jack Black play a guy who always wanted to be a filmmaker but never had the balls to move out to Hollywood, Paul Rudd embody a washed-up has-been who markets his failures as expertise gathered at the top of the world, Steve Zahn portray someone so embarrassingly emasculated that he makes Jack Black look like an alpha puppy, and Thandiwe Newton work effortlessly as the “straight woman” anchoring the lot, all the while they head out to the Amazon to shoot a movie they eventually end up starring in because a massive anaconda decides to turn them into breakfast, will count as incredibly refreshing. Boy, was that a long sentence.

How this entire narrative is structured and how it shapes up is simply much cooler and more evocative than anyone could ever expect a film starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd would be. It effortlessly traverses multiple planes of self-aware comedy, self-parody, and general post-Apatow cringe comedy. You can clearly see that everyone involved had a lot of fun, especially in moments where Jack Black’s character—who works as a director of wedding videos while kidding himself that it counts as filmmaking—talks passionately about a cinematic intro, beatboxes elements of the score that the movie’s own score then imitates and thus foreshadows what Anaconda will do itself. Then, as they all go to the jungle, recite from memory Jon Voight’s lines that they remember as iconic (no judgments here) and attempt to make a movie about a giant snake while unknowingly finding themselves in this movie, it’s just so much fun to untangle all those onion layers of meta-relationship with the franchise. I don’t want to say that this is what Anaconda directed by a Charlie Kaufman fan would look like, because it would come across as pretentious and thoroughly imprecise, but it lives in the same neighborhood. These two movies—this one and the inexistent Charlie Kaufman’s Anaconda—send their kids to the same school, if that makes any sense.

One more—to reiterate: this movie is way more fun than it honestly should have been. Despite the fact it is limited by the parameters of a mainstream comedy that feels as though it needed to settle for an action-oriented climax eventually, as well as your own tolerance of some of the movie’s more indulgent antics, Anaconda Mark 2025 functions rather well as a meta-parody of the franchise. It’s funny and paced just about well enough that whenever lulls in the narrative rear their heads, the cast distracts from any nascent dullness with a funny gag, a one-liner or even a deeper comedic cut of its own meta-provenance. It’s just a fun time at the movies with no strings attached made to appeal to general audiences, who wandered off the street to see what’s playing right now and they didn’t feel like watching anything prestige-adjacent, fans of the Anaconda franchise who appreciate its bare-naked sloppiness, and those who like when their movies bob and weave between narrative dimensions while having fun at their own expense.