Anaconda an amiably absurd spoof, The Great Flood drowns in confusing conceit

Anaconda (PG13)

100 minutes, opens on Dec 25

★★★☆☆

The story: A hapless quartet travel deep into the Amazon River to remake the 1997 Hollywood B-movie Anaconda and encounter a real, very big and very hungry anaconda.

The American adventure comedy Anaconda is an homage to run-and-gun guerilla film-making where anything could go wrong. And everything does, with middle-aged losers like wedding videographer Doug (Jack Black) and failed actor Griff (Paul Rudd).

The lifelong buddies are on a quest to fulfil their childhood aspiration of updating their favourite cinematic “classic”.

They have a script, a snake handler (Selton Mello), a river boat plus two other school pals (Steve Zahn and Thandiwe Newton) on board.

Just like the documentary crew in the original Anaconda, starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube, are taken hostage by an insane hunter, they run afoul of armed smugglers.

“We came here to make Anaconda and, now, we’re in it,” freaks out Doug, shortly before he is eaten by a patently fake-looking giant anaconda stalking them. Wild-eyed comic Black is even funnier as a corpse than he is running for his life, strapped to a boar.

Already, the creature has consumed a rival Sony Pictures production team on location for a licensed Anaconda sequel.

Co-writer and director Tom Gormican came to attention for the Nicolas Cage self-parody The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2022). He has again gone all meta with an amiably manic spoof of the current monster movie trend towards intellectual properties, nostalgic franchise revivals, psychological depth and loud pyrotechnics.

The bumbling heroes are incapable of any of these. Still, it is never too late for old friends to get back together in pursuit of youthful dreams.

Hot take: Snakes alive. This genre send-up is absurd and affectionate with bonus surprise cameos.

The Great Flood (NC16)

116 minutes, available on Netflix

★★☆☆☆

The story: An asteroid collision has melted Antarctica. Humanity is doomed, unless young single mother An-na (Kim Da-mi) and her son (Kwon Eun-seong) are rescued from the massive flood engulfing the world.

An-na wakes to a submerged apartment in The Great Flood. And the South Korean disaster drama, which is set inside her 30-storey housing block on earth’s final day, immediately sweeps you along, gasping for air, in the terrifying chaos of the digital-effects tidal waves.

It is an intense opening act. An-na piggybacks her six-year-old and begins making her way up the stairs level by level through throngs of other panicked residents seeking safer ground.

Escorting them both is a security officer (Park Hae-soo) because An-na is an artificial intelligence researcher, the key, he tells her mysteriously, to creating a new human race.

If only writer-director Kim Byung-woo had continued with the doomsday thrills that were his award-winning calling card The Terror Live (2013). He wants to upend expectations instead, hence the movie segues into a genre-hybrid like his recent Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (2025). It is like a poor reconstruction of Christopher Nolan’s high-concept science-fiction Interstellar (2014) mostly, as, over and over, An-na becomes separated from, and then searches for, her whiny kid in a recursive time structure.

Your emotional engagement gets worn down by each ever more confusing, barely coherent iteration of her survival journey, despite actress Kim (The Witch, 2018) giving the role her all. She swims against the tsunamis in desperate acts of maternal self-sacrifice, dodges gas explosions and fights off looters while the story treads water, continually resetting without purpose or direction.

Hot take: An impressive apocalyptic spectacle ends up drowning in over-ambition.