Now that we’ve treated ourselves to the facts about the queen of the river monsters, it’s time to get silly. The first rule of a monster movie is: Make it bigger, make it meaner, and if the facts don’t back you up, make up new facts. The Hunt for the Blood Orchid gives us the big giant vicious aggressive monster snake, with a frame story that’s amazingly topical twenty years after the film was released. Some tropes never go out of style.
The film isn’t really about anacondas, in spite of the title and the opening sequence, which features native hunters fleeing a hunting tiger (extra! bonus! monster!), a giant snake that attacks and devours one of them, and blood-red petals floating in the water he died in. It’s about a struggling medical-research company that’s about to get shut down by Big Evil BackerCorp for lack of bankable results. Just one more chance, the company head begs. One more expedition. One more try at unimaginable billions in profits.
The quarry is the Blood Orchid, a plant that lies dormant for seven years, then blooms for six months. The orchid produces a chemical that cancels out the Hayflick limit—the number of times a human cell can replicate before it breaks down. This is the key to immortality, or least to considerably prolonged life. The possibilities, Big Evil Corp is assured, are endless. “It will be bigger than Viagra!”
That hooks Evil CEO. He approves the expedition, with a nearly impossible time limit. The orchid has been found deep in the jungle of Borneo, but there’s only two weeks left before it stops blooming and goes back to being dormant. Then it’s another seven years before it can bloom again.
Let’s not ask too many questions here. Like, is there only this one population? Aren’t there any others that might bloom at different times? If it’s that vanishingly rare, how are our intrepid hunters planning to produce enough magic serum to make it commercially viable?
Even if it’s reserved for the ultrarich, it still takes fifty flowers to produce an ounce of the chemical. Just how big is this garden in the jungle?
As I said, don’t ask. Sit back and watch the plot bunnies breed. We only have a week! To get to the orchids! In the monsoon! That’s made the river just about impassable! And we can’t get there anyway because the charter companies have all shut down! Because monsoon! Even though Sexy Corporate Rep booked a boat!
But there is an alternative. There’s one guy who can be paid enough to brave the river. His boat is a hunk of junk and he’s a straight-up hunk and so is his hunky sidekick, and it’s the only way any of us is getting those orchids.
“Us” being a collection of hunky and/or sexy actors with no or minimal name recognition. There’s the star according to the credits, Wholesomely Sexy Blonde Assistant to Evil Greedy Biologist. There’s Darkly Sexy Corporate Rep, who yells a lot when she’s isn’t bitching or screaming. There’s Research Company Boss Guy and his techie sidekick. And there’s Sexy Medic to fill out the roster.
They all pile into the boat, which has an additional nonhuman screw member, an adorable monkey named Kong. Kong is, to a large extent, the main viewpoint character. He weighs in early and often on what’s really out there, versus the humans’ preoccupation with money, time crunches, technological disasters, and personal and plot drama. The more dramatic they get, the more we notice how Kong is watching the water. He screams at it early and often.
The plot bunnies by now have swelled into plot alligators. The rain keeps falling and the river keeps rising, and the boat starts breaking down. One breakdown causes them to miss their turn toward the safe route to the orchid. And not just miss it—there’s a waterfall! A huge one! And the boat goes over!
And that’s it for the poor old Bloody Mary.
But Hunky Captain knows another guy with a boat. He gets on the satellite phone (with more drama) and books a rendezvous with the grizzled, booze-guzzling John Livingston. But in order to get to it, our bickering crew have to slog through the jungle. And as Kong makes sure to let us know, there’s something in the water. Not to mention in the trees.
That something is about to make itself known. Sexy Medic teases Sexy Corporate Rep into a rage by humming the Jaws theme—and he gets what he asks for. The biggest snake Hunky Captain has ever seen comes surging up out of the water. And that’s it for Sexy Medic.
That’s the not the last or the least of the expedition’s woes. If sinking one boat makes good drama, let’s make even more by sinking another boat—and this time, let’s blow it up. Boom. But there’s still hope. Hunky Captain knows where there’s a village. Headhunters, Hunky Sidekick says, which winds the city folk up, but really, they haven’t actively hunted heads in a hundred years.
Which doesn’t prevent the village from being liberally decorated with piles of skulls. And featuring a grisly centerpiece: an absolutely massive, far bigger than the biggest that’s ever been seen, very dead snake with the legs of a very dead indigenous man poking out from a slash in its side. That’s the only person left in the village. It’s deserted.
But there’s a Sign. A Blood Orchid. This is the way. They’re on the right track after all.
Greedy Biologist is done with sharing by this point. He’s out to grab the orchids and bolt for civilization, where he’ll get impossibly rich and the rest of the expedition will most likely get dead. Though the ratio of human drama to snake is seriously lopsided, that’s about to change.
Our not-so-heroes have figured out that the magic orchid chemical has leached into the environment and affected the animals that live near it. Including anacondas. Plural.
Anacondas, we’re told, don’t stop growing until they die. With magic orchid chemical in board, they’ve gone well past the Hayflick limit. They’ll keep growing forever. Which is proof that the chemical does what Sexy Biologist claims it does. They just have to get to it and harvest orchids.
There’s only one problem. The anacondas who have been attacking are apparently males on the hunt for a female. They’ve found her in a nice deep watery pit right next to the orchids.
The only way to get the orchids is to cross the pit and harvest them by hand, and hope the snakes are too busy with their mating ball to notice. Evil Biologist sends Wholesomely Sexy Assistant across at gunpoint and forces her, with much drama, to do the honors.
That’s not all the drama there is, or all the body count, either. It’s not just snakes that make this jungle deadly. It’s spiders, too
Evil Biologist is not greedy enough, or stupid enough, to harvest his own orchids. But greed and stupidity, and a venomous spider, bring him down. Literally. Into the mating ball, where he gets what he deserves. And so do the snakes, buried in a mudslide that none of them is likely to survive.
Though maybe, considering their size and strength and their ability to tunnel through the jungle, some of them will make it. They’re virtually immortal after all, and there must be more orchids in the jungle, lying dormant, ready to rise and bloom and infiltrate the environment with their magic chemical.
But for now, as far as the film lets us know, that’s it for the hunt for the Blood Orchid. All Sexy Corporate Rep wants is a bath and a little quality time with Kong. Wholesomely Sexy Blonde and Hunky Captain want each other. And wiseass tech guy gets to paddle the raft they’ve cobbled together, sailing off into the sunlight.
The anacondas in this universe are impossibly big and impossibly aggressive. But there’s an explanation for both: magic orchid chemical and irrepressible mating urge. When people get eaten, they get chewed and swallowed in a few seconds, which is way off the truth. But it’s not nearly as dramatic to watch a snake strangle its prey and then take hours to swallow it whole—no chewing involved. Just a long, slow, excruciating process with minimal screaming and no thrashing or bleeding.
It’s a very silly film. Just the thing for a chilly winter weekend, with just enough snake action amid all the human drama to keep this viewer’s interest up.
