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Anaconda was a perfect amalgam of the two trends, operating less as an outright comedy and more like a very silly “serious” movie - it played the scares straight, except the whole thing was so ridiculous that it was hard to keep from laughing. Earlier in the decade, the lighthearted monster movies Arachnophobia and Tremors had demonstrated that there was a market for killer-critter horror films that spoofed the genre’s overblown tendencies. The two highest-grossing films of 1996 were Independence Day and Twister - gonzo blockbusters that celebrated widespread destruction caused by, respectively, aliens and Mother Nature. Why was it a big deal at the time? The mid-to-late ‘90s was a halcyon period for disaster movies.
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And all of them took a backseat to a fake snake with a bad attitude. Voight was an Oscar winner who’d become a go-to character actor in big studio movies like Heat and Mission: Impossible. Wilson was the goofy guy from Bottle Rocket and The Cable Guy. and then as a solo artist, and he’d proved himself on the big screen with both dramas ( Boyz n the Hood) and comedies ( Friday). ( Out of Sight would follow the next year.) Ice Cube had enjoyed a multi-platinum recording career in N.W.A. Lopez was transitioning from dancer and singer to actress, earning acclaim for her breakthrough role in 1997’s Selena, which came out just a few weeks before Anaconda.
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So was the bizarre mixture of mismatched acting talent brought to bear on this cheese-fest. “They paid that snake, like, $10 million to build that dumb thing.”īut the anaconda’s very un-cutting-edge look was part of the charm. “Do you know that snake got paid more than we did?” Ice Cube said years later. Where other movies were exploring the possibilities of this new special effects technology known as computer graphics, director Luis Llosa’s thriller was an enjoyably creaky, low-budget affair.
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From its peekaboo scares to Voight’s knowingly hammy performance as the menacing bad guy, Anaconda invited audiences to shriek and laugh in equal measure. This was very much meant to be a Z-grade monster movie that, ideally, you’d watch at a drive-in - if you could find one, of course. Spoiler alert: Not everyone makes it.Īnaconda didn’t try to hide its tongue-in-cheek tone. If Terri and her team are going to get out alive, they’ll have to work with this psychopath. He’s after big game, you see: a ginormous anaconda that enjoys devouring humans after squeezing the life out of them. She is joined in this endeavor by her trusty creative team - including cameraman Danny (Ice Cube), anthropologist Steven (Eric Stoltz), and soundman Gary (Owen Wilson) - and along the way, they encounter Paul (Jon Voight), a batty snake hunter with an oddly fluctuating accent who befriends them, only to take over their expedition. A camp classic and an unlikely trendsetter, the action-horror film starred Jennifer Lopez as Terri, a determined documentarian who has traveled to the Amazon to make a movie about the mysterious Shirishama tribe. This week, we celebrate Anaconda, which hit theaters on April 11, 1997. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.