Anaconda / YMMV - TV Tropes

Awesome Music: Randy Edelman's entire score, whether it be a somber piece or a bombastic one. Serone's Last Sand is the standout example.
Complete Monster: Paul Serone is a former priest from Paraguay who decided to become a snake poacher in the Amazon, catching them for rich clients. Serone arranges with his partner Matteo to lure a film crew into the territory of a giant, man-eating anaconda to serve as bait for his hunt. Incapacitating the team leader with a poisonous wasp, Serone allows Matteo to be Eaten Alive, then recruits a new hapless partner from among the crew and sacrifices him as well when the option of saving him threatens Serone's profits. Serone later strangles the man's girlfriend to death when she attempts to avenge him. After being overthrown and escaping, Serone captures two of the remaining people inside the anaconda's feeding grounds, attempting to feed them to the snake while mocking their impending deaths. Driven by nothing save Greed, Serone proves to be worse than even the monstrous snake.
Creepy Awesome: Serone may in fact be the patron saint of this trope. He even seems to go out of his way to be more creepy just to fuck with everybody.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The Queen Anaconda that serves as the Final Boss for the movie and is only in the climax, but she became quite popular for a majority of reasons: Killing Serone, her intimidating design, and her scene being one hell of a memorable one all contributed to her popularity.
- It's hard to find someone who doesn't like Westridge, due to his Character Development and absolutely awesome death scene.
Harsher in Hindsight: Many, many critics pointed out that giving Jennifer Lopez the line "This film [in reference to the in-universe documentary about indigenous people that her character is trying to shoot] was supposed to be my big break, and instead it's become a big disaster" was seriously Tempting Fate. A few years later, Gigli became a Box Office Bomb and seriously derailed her acting career, and Lopez would not star in a critically or commercially successful movie until 2019's Hustlers.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Serone mentions that he started out studying for the priesthood. Eight years later, Jon Voight would play a very famous priest indeed: Pope John Paul II
- Jennifer Lopez, a woman famous for her butt, starring in a film called Anaconda. Come 2015, cue jokes about the titular snake wanting J. Lo's buns, hon. During the live Rifftrax showing of Anaconda, the pre-show cards noted that that coincidence plus Nicki Minaj using MST3K in her "Anaconda" video only proved MST3K was all about the butt.
Narm: In the first film, there is a sinister shot of the anaconda gliding underwater — which is quickly ruined by the face of the recently devoured Gary pressing up through the snake's skin, as if it were made of rubber.
Narm Charm: Jon Voight's performance as Paul Serone is absurdly over the top. It is clear that whoever thought that casting Voight as a character with a thick ambiguously South American accent was a good idea was probably high. That said, in a film where the rest of the cast is so clearly apathetic about their performances, it is not hard to find yourself mesmerized by the pure and total hamminess of Voight's performance simply because, unlike the rest of the cast, he is actually trying. Winking at the heroes as if to say, "I told you so" (and maybe "You're next!"), after being regurgitated by the snake is probably the high point of the film. Admittedly, it actually kind of makes sense if you look at it as him trying to channel Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Towards the end, he even loses the accent and talks for a few minutes in a Brando-like voice.
Sequelitis: Not that the first movie was a masterpiece of film, but it had a big budget and did well at the box office. By the second movie, the filmmakers were basically just making up shit as they went along, until they reached the Made-for-TV Movie of a Nigh-Invulnerable mutant mega-anaconda stage, made on the budget of a ham sandwich.
Special Effects Failure:
- Between the weightless CGI models and the dull, dead-looking animatronics (though one could say that the CGI snakes are at least better than the animatronics), the anacondas are not inspiring fear. Especially silly is the short tussle between an anaconda and a jaguar, which looks like a wrestling match broke out at a taxidermist's office.
- One non-anaconda-related moment from the first film is a shot of the boat advancing through the river... while the waterfall in the background is going backwards.
- Hunt for the Blood Orchid may have had terrible CGI, but it doesn't compare to the sequels that followed it up.
So Bad, It's Good: Many viewers consider this film laughably stupid. Roger Ebert was one of the film's biggest supporters in this regard, often referring to it as "great trash" while sincerely praising the cinematography and premise.
The Un-Twist: Paul spends so much time being a creepy perverted South American that some expect him to actually be a good guy. Nope, he is a Card-Carrying Villain.
Visual Effects of Awesome: For all of the moments of Special Effects Failure the first film had, the moment the snake leaps from a tree to snatch a victim midair falling from a cliff is just awesome.

YMMV / Anaconda

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