Anaconda
King Kong meets Apocalypse Now. A group of city dwellers go on a trip to the Amazonian Jungle to film uncontacted tribes.
The hero director is J-Lo, a girl from the hood looking for her big break. Her DP is also from the hood, a stereotypical Ice Cube. There’s some production assistant, the classic fragile valley girl and the sound dude who is trying to bang her, a surfer dude with plenty of reefer (Owen Wilson, but not funny or anything). The documentary is presented by a proper Englishman, the kind who takes fragile wine and ornate glasses to a swamp boat ride. The anthropologist tracking the tribe is J-Lo’s love interest, and all around hot librarian, a bona fide Indiana Jones (Eric Stolz, the other Marty McFly).
Their boatman is like a less developed boat captain from King Kong, the mysterious rogue.
Their first setback is picking up a feisty Jon Voight, channelling his Deliverance role, a snake trapper and poacher. He takes over the trip, either charming his way out or brutally attempting to kill all those who oppose him. They do his bidding, getting to a snake holy ground and attempting to catch a live anaconda, using dead monkeys as bait.
It’s all for nought, for the animatronic snake is a slasher monster, a kind of voodoo snake, adept at tracking boats, and catching its prey with superhuman efficiency. They get picked up by the snake, one by one, but the trapper leaves a body count too. The people from the hood survive, and so does the hero’s love interest, thankfully.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.