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.