Sony Pictures has dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror comedy, Anaconda, a meta-reboot of the 1997 campy cult classic—and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun. Starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, the film will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day.
(Spoilers for the 1997 film below.)
The original Anaconda was your basic B-movie creature feature, only with an all-star cast and better production values. The plot revolved around a documentary film crew (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, and Owen Wilson) who travel to the Amazon in search of a long-lost Indigenous tribe. They take on a stranded Paraguayan snake hunter named Serone (Jon Voight, affecting a hilariously bad foreign accent), who strong-arms them into helping him hunt down a 25-foot green anaconda. He wants to capture the animal alive, thinking he can sell it for over $1 million.
The snake has other ideas, chowing down on the boat's skipper and the crew's sound engineer and still hungry for more. The remaining crew's efforts to survive are hampered by Serone, who still wants the snake alive and even kills one of the crew members himself. So it's really a form of justice when he's eaten by a 40-foot queen anaconda at the film's end.
Anaconda wasn't well-received by critics, but it made a decent showing at the box office, grossing about $136 million globally. It has since become a cult classic, one of those "so bad it's good" offerings. It was even nominated for six Razzie Awards, including for Worst Screen Couple (Voight and the animatronic anaconda).