ANACONDAS: TRAIL OF BLOOD

Multi-millionaire Murdoch continues to fund scientific research on anacondas in Eastern Europe in order to extract the elixir of eternal youth and cure, thus, the cancer that is slowly leading him to death. But the scientist working on the elixir mysteriously disappears and Murdoch, believing that the man has fled with the serum to put himself at the service of some pharmaceutical industry, hires a killer to find the scientist, recover the serum and kill anyone who might interfere with the mission. But meanwhile, a large anaconda with regenerative powers has escaped from the laboratories and will be ready to wreak havoc among a group of young and reckless archaeologists. We have reached the fourth (and hopefully last) chapter of this small saga started in the now distant 1997 by Luis Llosa and continued over the years, passing through the hands of Dwight Little until falling into the grip of the clumsy Don E. FauntLeRoy (who competes with M.Night Shyamalan for the longest and most unpronounceable name) who in one fell swoop and in defiance of all directs "Anaconda 3" and "Anaconda 4", or rather the most rotten chapters of the entire quadrilogy. Making a very small summary, it is impossible for us not to immediately notice how the entire saga is divided in turn into two other sagas: on the one hand we have the first "Anaconda", on the other we can lock up the rest. Now nothing remains of the population Indios Shirishama, of the huge serpent worshiped as if it were a deity and, more generally, of that marked and perfect marriage between horror and adventure. The theme that seems to have prevailed, and that seems to have captured the interest of screenwriters and producers the most, is the one introduced in the second film and characterized by very more fantasy or science fiction tones: wild orchids with mysterious regenerative powers and huge serpents made invincible precisely by the latter. Thus, both "Anaconda 3" and this "Anaconda 4" directly connect to the first sequel and decide to carry on the discussion on regeneration by expanding and enlarging it with a series of "nonsenses" so big that they put the patience and intelligence of the viewer to a hard test. We have already talked about "Anaconda 3" and all its countless absurdities (as well as zoological blunders) included in the plot; now let's talk about "Anaconda 4" and that first true chapter that imposes itself as a real sequel since it starts right where the third film ended and calls to the roll characters seen in the previous chapter. The premise of finding the same characters and the same situations, combined with the bad omen of finding the same guy in the director's booth, is certainly not the best and could say a lot from the start about the actual quality of the film in question. However, let's not make the step longer than the leg and not draw hasty conclusions, because if on the one hand it is true that "Anaconda 4" is a film on the verge of being watchable, it is also true that there has been some small improvement compared to "Anaconda 3". Everything seems to remain subject to the enormous general incompetence that manages everything (but it could not be otherwise, the team that hides behind the two films is the same), but at least this time the nonsense is kept in check (there is only one snake that regenerates) and the special effects in computer graphics take a leap in quality passing from obscene to simply bad. What remains a mystery and really leaves you speechless, however, is the design of the animal that looks like everything but an anaconda. We go for the absurd and the animal more than a snake looks like a dragon out of some Japanese cartoon or better yet a monster out of the pen of Tolkien. Nothing, but absolutely nothing, is capable of recalling in memory the anaconda that nests in the imagination of all of us and if we really want to reduce the being that crawls in this film to some snake existing in nature, with all due efforts, it is easier for us to reduce it to snakes such as the viper, or maybe the rattlesnake. But not the anaconda, no certainly! What can be said about the rest? The same words more or less spent for the third film. The direction is flat, the screenplay struggles a lot to shift gears and turns out so weak that it easily ends up in boredom and all the actors (except for some small exceptions) are so anonymous that they induce the most malicious of viewers to think that they were hired on the fly on the streets of Romania (where the film was shot) and rewarded with a crate of beer. On the gore/splatter side, little to say: this saga has never had the opportunity to shine in this field so the most that this "Anaconda 4" can offer is a series of blood splatters roughly done in digital, nothing more. Little else remains to be said. The only thing to do is hope – despite the threatening open ending – that the one of "Anaconda" is a saga of which we should not talk about anymore in the times to come. Four films for a story that from the beginning did not have much to say seem enough to us, don't they?