BOA (2002) So how does a reptile survive in the Antarctic when the heater's on the fritz? If you're anything like me, you think giant man-eating snakes are cool, and you're probably in the market for a movie about an Antarctic prison. So a movie about a giant snake attacking an Antarctic prison has got to be a slam dunk, right? Wrongo. So there's this giant super-mega-maximum-security prison being built in Antarctica by a secret coalition of 35 countries, where they plan to house 25,000 of the world's nastiest criminals (shipped in at a rate of twenty a month...you do the math). New Alcatraz, it's called. They appear to have forgotten the lesson of the old Alcatraz - nobody can afford to maintain prisons like this. And since it's a secret prison, and everybody's convicted and sentenced (to life) in secret, it would be a lot more lucrative to just kill the prisoners and sell off their organs. Perhaps with such financial concerns in mind, they've really cheapened out on the help - you'd think that a super-prison 20 miles from the south pole would hire the hardest, meanest, badass-est guards they could find, but all these guys say things like "I'm not going in there!" before they even know there's a giant snake. For some reason, they're drilling miles deep into the earth at this site (I didn't catch exactly why they're drilling, why they find it necessary to drill two miles down, or why they saw fit to install a ladder going all the way down that hole) and hit a big hollow rock filled with pure nitrogen. One guy helpfully explains that pure nitrogen is what museums store ancient manuscripts in to preserve them. This preservation process appears to apply to giant prehistoric snakes too, because one of them slithers out of the rock and starts eating people. So, they have to call in a husband-and-wife paleontologist team (Dean Cain and Elizabeth Lackey) with controversial theories about how Antarctica was once teeming with giant reptilian life. Dean Cain seems to be everywhere these days, if by "everywhere" you mean all sorts of cheesy-looking straight-to-video genre flicks. He's like this year's Casper Van Dien. Cain and Lackey are always bickering about when the right time is to have kids, but take time out later in the movie to twice call this snake the greatest discovery in history (greater than fire? The wheel? Charlize Theron?). The snake looks terrible - as bad as the python in Python. It's all CGI, pretty low-res, never believable for even half a second no matter how far you stretch your disbelief. It would have to be bad CGI to be able to suspend its 100-foot, tons-heavy body from one pipe in the ceiling sprinkler line. Nobody at any point calls it a boa, and I would go so far as to suggest that it probably isn't a boa, since it has fangs and a big shovel-like barb on the end of its tail. Cain calls it "the missing link", though he does not suggest what it links to, or from. I would guess between boas, and something with fangs and a tail-barb. The plot is stupid, with characters all acting as stupid as they need to in order to get eaten. Homage (I'm being kind) is paid to Alien/Aliens in a scene where the warden watches on a bunch of monitors as some soldiers try to hunt down the snake. Motion detectors show something coming towards one of the groups of soldiers, so the warden has a shitfit and pleads for them to shoot, which they do, of course killing one of their own men. (friendly-fire wisecrack removed for reasons of taste considering that the events of the past week have only proven it correct) The climax, set in the ramp-lowered hold of a cargo plane in mid-flight, would be hard enough to swallow even if the effects didn't suck, which they do. This snake keeps changing size, even in the same scene! I'm not even gonna get into the IRA prisoner chick who pleads with Cain not to let her be killed by a snake (so he shoots her as she's getting chomped by the snake...but it eats her anyway), the fighter planes that use nuclear missiles to force a civilian airliner to land, the computer hacker, how the snake tunnels through walls, how the guy who was going to set off nukes in Russia is made into a good guy with a sob story about his wife...crap, thy name is Boa. As dumb as all this is, as bad as the effects are, and as lame and uninspired are the efforts of everyone involved, there are the occasional moments where the movie rises up above worthlessness. I don't know why this prison saw fit to build a huge underground chamber with regularly-spaced support pillars, but it is kind of neat to see (briefly) the snake slithering among them without touching the ground. The prison looks pretty good from the outside, even if on the inside the sets are either rehashed (the same corridor keeps cropping up) or functionally nonsensical (security is headed in one room by one guy in a chair that swivels around to look at dozens of monitors that surround him). The girls are cute, though in keeping with the Antarctic setting, they're wearing way too many clothes to add any value to the movie that isn't provided by their performances and dialogue. Boa is rated R, but barely earns a PG until one scene which calls on Cain to say "fucking" seven or eight times. Python sucked, but its madcap incompetence gave it a silly streak that made it more fun than Boa, which is dumb enough to be insulting and too straight-faced to let me easily assume that it's all in good fun. Even if you think Anaconda sucked, this will redefine the term for you. Proceed only with the most masochistic of intentions. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE