Movie Review by Neils Hesse
Starring: Johnny Messner, KaDee Strickland, Matthew Marsden, Eugene Byrd
Director: Dwight H Little
The big slippery Amazonian reptiles are given a chance at a new lease of life in this second film that is not really a sequel but rather an attempt at addressing the same “big snake eats people theme” with a fresh story.
A team of desperate scientists travels to Borneo where they enlist the aid of an embittered ex-marine turned riverboat captain to take them down a river in search of the blood orchid. This flower that they seek blooms once every 7 years and only for a short period thereafter and wouldn’t you know it they have just one week before it disappears possibly forever. Now you may ask yourself why go to all the bother just for a silly little plant? Well the plant could hold the answer to eternal youth and by getting a sample they could mass produce a chemical equivalent that would make them billionaires many times over.
As with all hastily planned ideas something is bound to go wrong and soon enough thanks to the heavily flooded river and the bursts of heavy rain, their boat soon capsizes as they travel upstream and go over a waterfall. They proceed on foot only to encounter a very, very big snake that promptly dispatches with one of their number, before their knowledgeable captain informs them that being the rainy season it is mating season and so all the snakes will be converging on the rare female or females in the area, as one character puts it in the film “one big snake orgy out in the jungle”. Now they must either band together and get the hell out of there or give in to their executive leader’s (Matthew Marsden) desperation to get the orchid that will finally make him filthy rich.
The first big Hollywood film that introduced us to these menacing creatures was considered by many to be utter popcorn fodder but even then at least it had some interesting characters particularly Jon Voight’s sadistic captain/hunter and the shots of the snakes killing the human were more than just a handful. This time around the film should really just have been called THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID as the slippery chaps only pop up here and there to dispatch off a few unlucky actors and further more the characters prove to be utterly forgettable.
Nonetheless for the average teenager who is satisfied with an average number of CGI enhanced killings, hot babes, a dude and a whiner all pitted together apparently fighting for their lives then this ought to suffice but for the cult fan this is not worth the trip to the multiplex.
