The Anaconda franchise is probably one of the most misbegotten IP exercises of the modern era. The original is one of those bone-stupid genre movies that were constantly becoming hits throughout the 1990s. Like, it outgrossed L.A. Confidential in 1997. And I Know What You Did Last Summer. Ditto Jackie Brown. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Boogie Nights, Selena, Air Bud, and Event Horizon too all knelt before its grandeur.

So it was inevitable that Anaconda was going to get a sequel. However, that didn’t come to theaters for a full seven years. That movie was also a box office success. Nevertheless, the franchise sank deeper and deeper into the IP muck the more it thrashed around. At the time, the sign that your franchise was losing steam was that it started going direct-to-video. Think 1995’s Leprechaun 3, 2000’s Hellraiser: Inferno, and 1995’s Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. And you wanna know what happened to Anaconda? It went straight to The Sci-Fi Channel. Friends, this is an even worse fate. However, the franchise’s jagged, clunky progress is what makes it so interesting. Like, even its impending 2025 remake is weird.

Ranking All the Anaconda Movies

Instead of a straightforward serpentine creature feature, we’re getting a meta comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black. Like… what? In honor of this baffling series of motion pictures, here is a ranking of the original Anaconda movies. I won’t be including the impending remake. Or the 2024 Chinese remake Anaconda: Cursed Jungle, which follows circus performers fighting a giant snake. That also sounds deliciously weird, but I literally just learned that it existed while writing this paragraph.

#5 Anaconda (1997)

So, I have (entirely unintentionally) made Horror Press a home for my controversial opinions. But I have never been anything other than scrupulously honest. And look, it’s true that 1997’s Anaconda has its advantages over the other installments. It has the biggest budget to play with. It has the most star-studded cast (Jennifer Lopez! Ice Cube! …Jon Voight… Baby Owen Wilson!). And it was the only Anaconda movie to actually be shot in the Amazon. Later installments would sub in Fiji, Romania, Bulgaria, and Australia.

However, all of that is what makes it downright offensive that the movie is such a harebrained mess. Everything about it falls flat. Primarily because the titular snake looks exactly like a shitty animatronic 99% of the time. It’s deeply unscary. And the untested main cast is so effortfully trying to ground it that it can’t succeed at a bad-good level.

The only thing that comes remotely close to working in this movie is Jon Voight. He is delivering his tooth-gnashing villain performance with one of the most baffling fake accents ever concocted. It’s compellingly bizarre, unlike anything else in the rest of the movie.

Regardless, the reason I rate this movie lowest is because it has no excuse to be this bad. Yes, there are at least three other movies in the franchise that are cheap, bad movies. But there is something demonstrably worse about being an expensive bad movie. Anaconda had the resources to become something truly great, or at least fun, and it largely failed to be either.

#4 Anaconda 3: Offspring (2008)

And here we have our first SciFi Original. And not the last, unfortunately. This movie is just shamefully cheap-looking. The anacondas themselves are CGI monstrosities that look more like strips of rubber from a tire than menacing serpents.

However, basically all of these movies feature at least one notable performer. You know the type. Someone who isn’t exactly surprising to find in a schlocky movie, but who at the very least has screen presence. A recipient of a grant from the Joan Crawford Make-A-Genre-Film Foundation for Aging Actors.

This movie has two, namely David Hasselhoff and John Rhys-Davies. Frankly, their powers combined don’t get them within an inch of what Jon Voight was working with. But at least it’s vaguely interesting seeing them forced to face off against anacondas that have escaped from a lab.

Sidebar: The Anaconda franchise is really a haven for some of our most toxically right-wing stars, isn’t it? What’s up with that?

#3 Anacondas: Trail of Blood (2009)

The one Crawford Foundation star that remains in this SciFi installment is John Rhys-Davies, which kinda should be a demerit. However, this movie has its benefits. The anaconda CGI is slightly better than Anaconda 3, at least. Slightly. Plus, the plot is both tighter and more enjoyable. It’s a yarn about a mutant anaconda that injects a bit of fun into an already pleasantly melodramatic story. There are human-level stakes and engaging villains in addition to the monster mayhem. Not to the point that Trail of Blood resembles a real movie, but at least it has its moments. Plus, the final 20 minutes or so are a real humdinger.

#2 Lake Placid vs. Anaconda (2015)

Somehow, combining two dumb franchises that were separately spawned from two dumb 1990s creature features worked! Go SciFi Channel (which had become Syfy by this point)! Lake Placid vs. Anaconda is ultimately a little bit more than the sum of its parts. By the by, the snakes are fighting crocodiles in this one, not the lake itself. In case you were confused.

Of the middle-of-the-pack offerings in the Anaconda franchise, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda is the most fun. For one thing, it benefits tremendously from featuring the latter-era Lake Placid character Reba (Yancy Butler). For those not in the know, she’s a salty hunter who loves stabbing crocs in the head. She’s a hell of a good time. Plus our Crawford Foundation star here is Robert Englund, who always adds a bit of spice to low-budget nonsense. And I bet you didn’t think there would be a sorority initiation in this movie, didja? So the movie gets some extra points for throwing another subgenre in there, just for funsies.

#1 Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004)

And now we’ve reached one of the few sequels in cinema history that surpasses the original. It retains the sexy cast and jungle mayhem of the original, but adds quite a few important components. This includes some comic relief that actually lands and a more intentionally campy story about immortality flowers.

One more thing. Now, keep in mind that I’m a bad person who is absolutely unmoved by animal characters who aren’t in Babe. So when I tell you there’s a monkey that I care about more than any human onscreen, that means something.

The holiday season is upon us, and I have a hard time feeling merry. After all, most of the Christmas horror movies are a little exclusionary outside of ignoring other cultural December festivities. Most of our go-to watches for this stretch of time have no room for POC, and especially Black women, in their picturesque settings. Which is why I took notice a few years ago when two genre movies gave me exactly what I wanted – a Black Girl Christmas. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love Black Christmas (1974), Krampus (2015), and The Lodge as much as the next broken millennial. However, like most movies in this subgenre, we’re rarely seen unless it’s for a trope. We can be sidekicks or day players, but we cannot be involved in the central conflict. We cannot lead, but we can serve. Part of my deal as an intersectional horror lady is asking and looking for movies that do better. So, imagine my surprise when Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night and Jenn Wexler’s The Sacrifice Game not only remembered Black people exist, but specifically thought Black girls deserve some Christmas magic too. 

Black Girls Deserve Christmas Magic Too

The Sacrifice Game is set in a 1970s boarding school where a handful of students are staying over Christmas break. The movie opens with a ritualistic massacre that pulls you in before introducing you to the core group at the school, though. Once in the halls of academia, which will obviously serve as the location for an impending blood bath, we meet Samantha (Madison Baines). Unlike most movies, this Black girl isn’t here for stereotypes and to be pushed to the fringes of the story. As she continues to survive this hellish night, we realize she might be the final girl. This hope is rewarded in the end when we watch her walk off to travel the world with her supernatural friend Clara (Georgia Acken). Because we have so few Christmas horror movies with Black girls getting to do anything, the movie heals something in me every year. 

Violent Night is a completely different vibe than The Sacrifice Game. It’s more of an action-comedy with some cool kills and a supernatural thread. The movie is set on Christmas Eve, present day, as a group of mercenaries interrupts a wealthy family’s celebration. The team of naughty killers has the misfortune of starting their plot when Santa (David Harbour) is dropping off gifts. Santa also has a past and opens a can of whoop-ass to save the family as he bonds with the adorable Trudy (Leah Brady) over walkie-talkies. No matter how many mercenaries tell her Santa Claus isn’t real, Trudy knows that he is coming to save her because she’s on the nice list and has a direct line to him this Christmas. She gets to keep a children’s sense of wonder as her family’s infighting and the trained assassins try to ruin her Christmas.

Representation Really Matters

Samantha and Trudy might be in different subgenres and might be a few years apart, but they have plenty in common. Both are surrounded by white characters, although Trudy’s is her family. They are also both a little down in the dumps, as are most characters in holiday films. Samantha has just been told she will not be coming home for the holidays and is feeling discarded. Trudy’s parents are heading for a divorce, and her extended family is too focused on money to be supportive. So, both feel utterly alone during the most depressing time of year and need a win. When things get violently bad for both, it’s nice to see supernatural entities whisk in for some problem-solving and to save them. 

That’s not to say that both of these resourceful girls don’t take out some of the intruders on their own. They just don’t have to do it all alone, and are not expected to save the day for everyone else. That’s right! We have two Black girls who get to be kids. I love the few movies where people actually help Black girls and women for a change. I want to live in world where that wasn’t such a rarity. It’s one of the reasons I loved  A Quiet Place: Day One. I wish more films that did this were greenlit. Instead we get ones that continually waste talent like Alfre Woodard in Annabelle. Sadly, this is the world I have to live in.

Watch Both ASAP

It is also not wasted on me that both movies take a standard holiday setting and make it inclusive. We have so many all-girls boarding school set movies that have exclusively all white casts. Seeing Samantha not only exist in this creepy school where The Sacrifice Game is set, but survive it felt like a Christmas gift itself. Watching Trudy light up from excitement as she navigates this huge house in Violent Night made me think of Home Alone and all of the other Christmas movies I grew up with. Movies that refused to acknowledge that Black people exist and blended families might also celebrate the holidays. Again, both of these movies heal something every year.

Again, these movies have very little in common aside from the same holiday and understanding that Black girls deserve some holiday cheer, too. However, they are two of the very few movies that do this. Which is why both make it into my yearly rotation. Most other movies are soaking in white feminism. They may have a Black sidekick and creative teams who need to research colorism and anti-Blackness. However, they are somehow usually more offensive than being ignored entirely.

So, Trudy and Samantha getting a slice of the Christmastime magic so close together stood out to me. They both warm my cold little black heart. As I hope kids are sneaking in watches of these movies behind their parents’ backs. I know they both would have been in heavy rotation when I was a kid. If these kinds of movies were getting made back then, anyway. Ideally, we’ll see more movies like these someday.