Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

What do you do an a Sunday afternoon when you want to go to the movies and you've seen Hero and Suspect Zero and everything else on the marqui? Well you take a deep breath, buy your ticket, and go to see Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.

There was a movie named Anaconda in 1997 that starred Ice Cube, JLo, Jon Voigt, Owen Wilson and Eric Stoltz. It featured amazing effects, a decent script and some good acting. This one has.... none of those things.

Johnny Messner, an unknown, is the captain of the boat that takes the crew down the river during rainy season looking for this Blood Orchid that will be the Fountain of Youth and make them all rich. Two very common themes in most of these disaster type movies. We think this actor was selected for his physique, which is good, and obviously not for his acting, which is not so good.

The trick to disaster movies is you have a short time to get us to like the people. Then we identify with them and we don't want anything bad to happen to them. When they get scared, we get scared and then it's a good movie. In this movie we didn't identify - every single person looks like they just stepped out of Hollywood casting and none remotely resembled the characters they played. And we were cheering for the snakes to eat them - not a good sign.

We do our usual bit to make it fun - we create a Who Goes First list and take bets on what order the cast will get killed. This one surprised us - one we thought wouldn't get eaten did and a few we thought should have did not.

On the positive side, this movie is interesting, it moves along at a good rate, it was fun - sometimes because it was well done and more often because we had fun laughing at it. It was not a bad experience at all - 10x better than Bourne Supremacy, for example.

We give it a 2.5 - pretty forgettable after leaving the theater but pretty fun.

Melissa was our cheerful and helpful concession stand gal who informed us today that they can't accept tips - Wha??? How come? Waitresses can, bell hops can, why not the friendly popcorn shoveller who gets you a fresh bag out of the Just Popped pile? Pueblo Tinseltown - let your concession stand folks accept tips!