Today's crap film is Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. This film was total rubbish. Many crap films manage to have a high entertainment value, due to the unintentional hilarity of their crap-ness. This was not one of them.

Some general observations: films about really bigass gigantor snakes are possibly more interesting when seen on a bigass gigantor movie screen, and not my 20-something inch television. Also, character development was incredibly poor. I am not even sure how many characters there were, as several of them seemed to be different incarnations of the same one or two guys. I'm sure they all must have had names, but none of the characters were really fleshed out enough that I remembered what they were called. There was "pompous British asshole who wanted to Win At All Costs", there was "rugged boat captain guy", "cocky oversexed doctor", etc.

Oh yeah, and Gail. I only remembered Gail's name because she was all the time screeching or bitching about something, and invariably falling down or otherwise encountering Peril, such that all the other nameless people had to keep shouting "Gail! Gail! OMG Gail!".

So: plot. I think this had one, at some point. Oh yeah, the legendary Blood Orchid. Supposedly this is one of those miracle rainforest drugs that will cure cancer and baldness and measles and also Make You Live Frigging Forever. So this pharmaceuticals company is rather keen to get hold of one. The catch: The legendary Blood Orchid blooms every seven years for six months and OMG dude there's only two weeks left. So the team has to go, like, RIGHT NOW down to Borneo to sniff this mofo out and bring it back home.

Once they get there, they find it's the rainy season and thus no captains are willing to take them down the Amazon. Someone suggests they seek out the legendary Jin-Soon, who is apparently a batshit crazy mercenary and will go damn near anywhere for insane amounts of money. Actually, this is all kind of a fake-out, as the legendary Jin-Soon turns out to be a bitter ex-military American guy named Johnson (aka Rugged Boat Captain Guy, as once we learn his name, everyone stops using it).

So he takes them all down the river. He has a pet monkey named Kong. Usually, I'm so totally down with monkeys. But in this film, the monkey exists solely to be the focus of countless (and I do mean countless) cut shots of the monkey looking alarmed, horrified, or expressing almost human disbelief at the antics of the research team.

Without giving too much away, I'll say that chaos ensues, people die (though it's hard to say who, or even how many people, as they were all completely two-dimensional stereotypes with no development or depth), all of the obvious foreshadowing comes to satisfying fruition, and there are some bigass gigantor snakes. Bonus: it is mating season for bigass gigantor snakes. Which reminds me, the science in this film is worse than dodgy. You can almost see the characters making shit up as they go along (oh yeah! The snakes did that because, um... yeah! It's, um.... mating season, yeah!).

Would I recommend this film? Well, no. I only saw it myself because I have this really sweet deal at Hollywood Video where I pay a flat rate for unlimited rentals, so I can rent some really shite films without actually losing anything other than valuable time. I'm not even sure I could, in good conscience, suggest that someone watch this on cable. Just... no. Don't do that to yourself, dude.