Boa vs. Python (2004)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Written by Sam Wells and Chase Parker
Directed by David Flores
Starring David Hewlett, Jaime Bergman, Kirk B.R. Woller, Adam Kendrick, and Angel Boris

Features:

• Trailer
  

Dindrane's Horror Warnings:

• Questionable herpetology
• Questionable military tactics
• Meanie-ol' FBI guy
• Villainess wearing stupid stuff to hunt in
• Goofy, GOOFY characters
• Painful-to-watch macking on the scientist chickie
• Python penis and snaky sex

Released by: Columbia-TriStar
Region: 1
Rating: R, for nudity, language, and violence
Anamorphic: Yes.

My Advice: Rent it only if you like monster movies

If you're a fan of monster movies, especially monster animal movies--like I am--then you've almost certainly heard of 2000's Python, 2002's Boa and now the made-for-TV sequel to them both, Boa vs. Python. In the grand old tradition of movies like Aliens vs. Predator and basically all B-movies ever, this film gives us a questionable back story and mediocre acting, all guaranteed to underwhelm you and maybe, maybe entertain you in a cheese-fest sort of way. We've all seen worse, after all...

The basic idea is that millionaire playboy Broddick (Kendrick) has a group of friends he invites to hunts, and he's just imported a giant python to be their next victim. The python, however, has other plans and escapes midway. Enter the FBI. Broddick then moves the time and place of his little hunt, summons his crew, and prepares to hunt the python as he had planned, but the FBI hires Emmett (Hewlett) and his giant boa "Betty" along with Monica (Bergman) and her tracking implants to find and kill the rogue python.

The characters are oddly interesting for a B-movie. We get Kent (Jeff Rank), the irritating, overly ambitious and rather dim reporter, and his erstwhile, slightly smarter cameraman, Louis (Velizar Binev). We get the usual bad guys and bad girl who likes to wear sexy leathers (Broddick and Eve), but the hunters assembled by Emmett are all interesting archetypes and play well off each other. When they are introduced, we get a kind of epic-style introduction to them, and the company front image of the hunters after they all assemble will kill you. The scene truly is handled with great pomp; it's really rather touching in a pathetic sort of way. They even subsequently refer to themselves as the "knights who would slay the dragon."

It doesn't help the film that the first deaths happen off-screen and we only get a few choice corpse bits when the scene is investigated by the FBI. The next few scenes of the film set up the "danger" of the situation and the specialties of the two doctors involved--a herpetologist and a woman who trains Navy dolphins to track things and has the machinery Our Heroes need to track the boa. We're almost halfway through the film when the requisite teens-having-sex-in-his-car get waxed. The producers could apparently only afford one real snake-snake battle, which is of course saved for the end, when it's too little, too late.

Animal rights viewers are probably horrified that the FBI's big plan is to use one giant snake to kill another. Okay, Broddick is nicely concerned about attaching Monica's sensors to his pet giant boa Betty, but no one seems to consider that the technology they can use to temporarily bring Betty down after she kills the python could, you know, be used to immobilize the python. You know, without killing it. Eventually, Broddick comes up with a handy plan to use some super-tranqs that we all know won't work.

Given that not one, but two of the female leads, Jaime Bergman/Boreanaz and Angel Boris, are also the star of several Playboy films, you might expect a lot of gratuitous nudity. You won't be precisely right, however. Aside from an early shower/bath scene, there's very little nudity in this fine feature. It's actually nice to have a movie allow women who are probably not taken very seriously in Hollywood do some real acting. No, this isn't Hamlet, but it's probably more challenging for them than your average soft-core porn. Probably. I mean, we do get a "lovely" scene of some python cunnilingus on a victim who is shortly thereafter munched. No pun intended.

There are no features per se on this selection, other than the film's original trailer and a collection of other trailer ads for other similar features from Columbia.

The CGI looks okay, but not great. The snakes are pretty, but not perfectly blended into their surroundings; this is clearly not a Skywalker Ranch production. If you, like me, think one of the things that makes or breaks a monster movie is the quality of CGI, then this movie will just be mediocre for its genre (while it will be considered piss-poor for a movie in general).

In short, if you're a die-hard fan of giant-animals-killing-humans movies then you should probably at least view this one, just for the satisfaction of seeing the snakes kill a few choice people. If, on the other hand, you expect even your B-movies to have good plots, fine acting, and avoid referring to female characters as "tasty biscuits," then you won't like this one a bit. It's pretty good for a B-movie, which is all it tries to be.