COMPANY: New Horizons
RUNTIME: 84 mins
FORMAT: T.V.
PLOT: A low-budget horror movie crew, inept kidnappers, and a reptile expert battle a monstrous anaconda/piranha hybrid in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
REVIEW: Piranhaconda premiered earlier this evening on the SyFy Channel as part of it's 'Most Dangerous Month on Television' campaign, and I wanted to rush and get this review written and posted while the movie was still fresh in my mind, and right off the bat I have to be honest here - I was not impressed with this one. It was nowhere near as entertaining as Sharktopus or as fun as Dinocroc vs Supergator had been, and it wasn't even as good as Camel Spiders was, all of which have also been made by the same crew of people.
RUNTIME: 84 mins
FORMAT: T.V.
PLOT: A low-budget horror movie crew, inept kidnappers, and a reptile expert battle a monstrous anaconda/piranha hybrid in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
REVIEW: Piranhaconda premiered earlier this evening on the SyFy Channel as part of it's 'Most Dangerous Month on Television' campaign, and I wanted to rush and get this review written and posted while the movie was still fresh in my mind, and right off the bat I have to be honest here - I was not impressed with this one. It was nowhere near as entertaining as Sharktopus or as fun as Dinocroc vs Supergator had been, and it wasn't even as good as Camel Spiders was, all of which have also been made by the same crew of people.
A big problem with Piranhaconda is that there's no overlaying plot in the slightest until over halfway through the movie, so a good 70% of the movie is mostly just random generic scene after random generic scene that could have easily been placed in any random order without changing the movie one iota, with an occasional misc death scene sprinkled in there. Then when they do finally put some form of plot in (I.E. the kidnappers attempting to put their plan in motion, and the film crew having to try to escape from them), it's mostly just boring, uninteresting and totally takes away from the rest of the movie and what people are actually watching a movie called Piranhaconda for - the damn Piranhaconda! They actually go almost half an hour without showing the creature at all, to focus on this uninteresting subplot of boring, terribly-acted human villains.
Adding to all of that, the title creature itself is very uninteresting as well. Giant snake with a piranha head? Other then visually, how is that any different at all then a regular giant snake? Change the visual model of the creature's head, and nothing else at all, and you could slap Anaconda 5 onto the title of this movie instead and have it fit perfectly. The creature doesn't even do any non-snakelike stuff - I was expecting some good water play or something else, but it mostly just slithers across the ground like normal and eats people like a normal giant snake would. They could have done so much more with the whole crossbreeding part in terms of cheesy scenes like Sharktopus did. Hell, they even say in the movie that it can burrow under the ground and come up to attack, which sounds friggin' awesome, but then they never actually have the Piranhaconda do that at all. It certainly didn't help that every single scene was shot in the exact same locations as Supergator, Dinocroc vs Supergator, and parts of Camel Spiders so with this being the 4th movie in the last couple years to use all these exact same locations, it's getting really rather boring now to watch different people run down the exact same paths and by the exact same factories, and get eaten in front of the exact same waterfalls. Roger Corman and Jim Wynorski are really going to have to step it up for their next release if they want to impress me, locale-wise.
On the plus side, I do like the twist of there actually being multiple creatures and not just the single one (though it was a total missed opportunity as well, seeing as how they do nothing at all with that really, but it's the idea of it that I like), and I thought the actual creatures themselves, in terms of the CGI graphics, actually looked pretty good and interacted with the physical objects realistically and quite well, which that alone can be a tough feat for these kinds of movies to overcome.
Also, those looking for a bloodbath will be kept mildly entertained as the red stuff hardly stops flowing, from gunshot wounds, to severed body limbs, to exploding people, there's enough in this one to keep your eyes on the screen during the action scenes. Sadly, while there is a nice bit of bloody deaths, there's not a whole lot of variety to them, as the majority of them are just the exact same kind of deaths over and over. Still, it's at least something, and something is always better then nothing in my books.
Other then those couple hings though, and a few funny lines of dialog, there really wasn't much in this one that I could find to like, sadly. Even the presence of Michael Madsen, an actor I tend to really enjoy (especially in movies like this), couldn't make this one worth it to me.
I had really been looking forward to Piranhaconda a lot as well, especially after the greatness of Sharktopus and Dinocroc vs Supergator, but this came nowhere even near as good as those movies had been.
4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward