Starring: Johnny Messner, Kadee Strickland, Matthew Mardsen
Directed by Dwight Little

At the end of this self serving exercise in horrifying hi-jinks, I came to the conclusion that snakes, even anacondas with mouths large enough to swallow a small banana republic without a burp, are less dangerous than human beings.

And my assumptions aren't just based on the bunch of characters who swamp the jungles of Borneo for nothing more than self-interest. I also speak of the makers of this film who seem to have gone into snaky pastures only to cash in on the 1997 film "Anaconda" which, if memory serves me correctly, had brought Jennifer Lopez into the limelight.

This one has a Lopez look-alike wading through the marshland, in more ways than one.

To the film's credit, it's shot on believable locations (Fiji filling in for Borneo). Stephen F. Windon's camerawork is exceptionally in mood, the natural greenery and pale yellow making way effortlessly for the dark, slushy, inky black of the climax where the characters play the survival game in the true horror-genre tradition.

The anorexic plot about executives of a New York-based pharmaceutical company's search for a life-sustaining variety of orchids in Borneo ("It's more potent than Viagra," they promise each other smugly) relies almost entirely on shock value.

The characters, not badly played by Hollywood second-rankers, seem to form a tentative loop in the narrative. We need to look at them as both, stock-in-trade and individuals, a tough thing to do since most of the time they're widening their eyes and curling their mouths in expressions of extreme horror.

The film does manage to shock us once in while. But the snakes of the title come in much after the narrative takes off. First of all one of the protagonists (strange, how you can't tell them apart in a horror movie) is attacked by a tamed monkey and then, more dangerously, by a crocodile. When the strong-and-silent boat owner (oh, don't we know his type!) rescues her from sure-death she exclaims, "I lost my phone!"

"Sorry," mumbles the aqueous Sir Galahad. "Next time I'll be more careful."

That's as funny as this er-okay-so-so adventure-horror tale gets.

The crocodile attack is staged almost exactly the way Steven Spielberg preambled his epoch making "Jaws" 30 years ago.

Spielberg was only 27 then. I don't know how old direct Dwight Little is. He made a version of "The Phantom Of The Opera" some years ago and has since then directed various trivia about terror and adventure as provocative kitsch.

In "Anacondas..." Little moves through a series of reasonably well orchestrated terror episodes. It isn't the quantity of terror that appeals as much as the film's unpretentious genre-homage.

Make no mistake, this freak-out fest targets itself at those who like to jump out of their seats and get entertained while doing so. The good news is, this film provides those mandatory thrills. The bad news is, the narrative lacks humour, except for an unintended spurt of chortles when a character lies inert after being bitten by a dangerous insect... and a gargantuan snake appears to hound him to sure death.

That's adding onslaught to injury. "Anacondas..." is the kind of film that makes a very basic pitch to grip audiences' attention.

What you shriek is what you get.