anacondas: Trail Of Blood

Anacondas: Trail Of Blood DVD Review

Grade: C-

Now the third Anacondas may have been ridiculous, but Trail of blood is just bad. Starting right after the third, Anaconda 3: Offspring, it quickly introduces us to a scientist working alone in a lab, enhancing the blood orchid--which was introduced in Anacondas: the Hunt For the Blood Orchid--and growing a giant snake. With the power of the blood orchid, the already-giant snake can now regenerate itself, and withstand everything from explosions to bullets.

Sounds cool, right?

Wrong. There are about a billion characters, all just there to be fodder to the snake, which you never really see. When you do see it, the CGI looks even worse than the CGI in the third one. Now I've been watching Sci-Fi channel movies for a long time, but this has to be some of the worse CGI I've ever seen. I withstood the CGI in the third one only because the third one was fun, but Trail of Blood's is just bad.

Back to the characters--boring!!! Their only purpose is to just either A) sit around and talk, or B) sit around and get eaten. Or one character chooses C), which is run wildly shooting (and missing) into the giant Anaconda's open mouth. These people are seriously suicidal.

Another thing I didn't like was that the snake would disappear for long periods of time, making the film even more boring. Even though the movie is only 88 minutes long, at times it feels like hours, with the actors and their inane dialogue--which feels exactly like filler material. For a movie with the term 'trail of blood' in it, I don't want to see people sitting around and talking! (And there's hardly any blood in this one, compared to the last one.)

The only redeeming qualities in Trail Of Blood are the fact that there are the occasional fun scenes. The snake, as bad as it may look, is still pretty awesome, (you gotta love these giant, very fake looking snakes....) and there is some decent action. To bad the entire movie looks like it was filmed with whatever money they had left from the last one.

(And Hasselhoff is missing--he was the fun part of the last one! To top it off, there's even a Hasselhoff look-alike in this one....)

Shot back-to-back with terrible "Anaconda 3: The Offspring," the fourth installment "Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood" is slightly better than its predecessor. That's what reviewers say and, yes, they are right. At least there are no useless "anaconda hunters" that only made the entire film look so stupid (not in the good sense). Still this time technically things are not much better as most of the actions lack tension and special effects still look so cheap. Most disappointingly the film is poorly written with a dearth of action.

Once again Crystal Allen stars as Dr. Amanda Hayes, a gun-toting scientist (and explosives expert) determined to stop all that she has foolishly created in the laboratory owned by a dying billionaire Mr. Murdoch (John Rhys-Davies). In the meanwhile, Mr. Murdoch hires a group of mercenaries to obtain what he thinks is his property - serum that can cure him of any disease. Also, Mr. Murdoch orders them to take care of Dr. Hayes should they come across her.

The problem is, of course, there is a giant snake at large in the woods of the Carpathians, where Amanda (guarded by two soldiers), the mercenaries and other characters including unsuspecting research team members walk around, looking for what they want.

Unfortunately for us, nothing big happens in the first half of the film. Obviously it was a bit tough for director Don E. FauntLeRoy to handle all these characters and narrative threads simultaneously. They walk, talk, sleep (or lose consciousness) and walk and talk again and we don't have many actions involving anaconda for which the film was made.

Though the film gets a little better in the second half, where things start moving faster, flat and inept direction kills potential "campy" fun the film's cheesy effects could have provided. Actors are doing their best, but "Anaconda 4" remains bad throughout, and this "bad" is not something you can enjoy watching as it was in the first "Anaconda" film with the scenery-chewing Jon Voight.

This movie is very exciting, action, and drama. This snake can not be killed even if it is cut in pieces, it will be restored. It kills but will not die all because of the hands of these scientists what they experiment.