Director : Dwight H. Little Starring : Morris Chestnut, KaDee Strickland, Eugene Byrd

Since Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Red Orchid screams "Exploitation!" and doesn't have a lot to live down, particularly its heritage, it uses a series of mounting obstacles and a game, if green, cast to create a mini-surprise here at the tail end of the dog days of summer.

No one will be mistaking it for Tremors but compared to a few "reputably-released" films of the last few summers, Reign of Fire or Eight Legged Freak, Anacondas comes out as a scarier, or at least more thrilling venture.

The premise is sufficiently silly. A team of scientists, researchers, and, it seems marketing managers, set out to find the fabled "blood orchid." Found only in Borneo, blooming once every seven years, the orchid may inhibit cell degeneration, making it a possible fountain of youth. The team is led by research scientist, Dr. Jack Byron (Michael Marsden, whose British, which means evil in this context). Admirably filling out her resume is Sam (KaDee Strickland, more about her later), Byron's protégé, straight out of school. We're never precisely sure about the hierarchy but Morris Chestnut plays Gordon Mitchell, some kind of team leader for a pharmaceutical company and so does Salli Richardson as Gail Stern. Also on the expedition is suave loverboy Dr. Ben Douglas (Nicholas Gonzalez) and filling out the Bill Paxton role from Aliens, Eugene Byrd as Cole.

Once in Borneo they discover they're at the height of the rainy season and the only boat they can charter belongs to Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner). The orchid is up-river, with many of the traditional tributaries now not navigable. It appears at this point that we're going to experience another slow boat to, well, Borneo, in this case with the group being slowly picked off by the titular big snakes.

But what starts to happen is a series of mishaps, mistakes, and snake attacks that make Anacondas a little more interesting than that. With about as many screenwriters as giant reptiles the producers, and director Dwight H. Little (Murder at 1600 squeezed as many twists and conflicts out of the collective drafts as allowed by the running time.

Some of the cast are refreshing as well. KaDee Strickland, who gets to go a little Sigourney Weaver on one snake, carries her role and makes an impression. After the first member of the crew is eaten her shivering, scared-shitless reaction, as she sits on the edge of a swamp, brings a human element that never made it to the screen in the first film (with the effervescent (at that time) Jennifer Lopez). Eugene Byrd's role as Cole could have been an irritant, but is, instead, necessary comic relief. Unintended comic relief is Johnny Messner's rendition of a tough guy. He claims to be a war veteran (of the Gulf War, we're to assume) but Messner plays him like a veteran of Venice Beach. One begins to wonder when the Gold's Gym opened up in Borneo, he's so ridiculously ripped.

Speaking of ripped, you may feel ripped off in one regard at this solid B movie. At no point in the film is Jon Voight disgorged from a snake's gullet, winking as he did in Anaconda. That should have be, like the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" which was planned to be in each successive iteration of Fantasia, included in each and every ensuing Anaconda film by contract.