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Anacondas: Trail of Blood

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Anacondas: Trail Of Blood DVD Review

Grade: C-

Now the third Anacondas may have been ridiculous, but Trail of blood is just bad. Starting right after the third, Anaconda 3: Offspring, it quickly introduces us to a scientist working alone in a lab, enhancing the blood orchid--which was introduced in Anacondas: the Hunt For the Blood Orchid--and growing a giant snake. With the power of the blood orchid, the already-giant snake can now regenerate itself, and withstand everything from explosions to bullets.

Sounds cool, right?

Wrong. There are about a billion characters, all just there to be fodder to the snake, which you never really see. When you do see it, the CGI looks even worse than the CGI in the third one. Now I've been watching Sci-Fi channel movies for a long time, but this has to be some of the worse CGI I've ever seen. I withstood the CGI in the third one only because the third one was fun, but Trail of Blood's is just bad.

Back to the characters--boring!!! Their only purpose is to just either A) sit around and talk, or B) sit around and get eaten. Or one character chooses C), which is run wildly shooting (and missing) into the giant Anaconda's open mouth. These people are seriously suicidal.

Another thing I didn't like was that the snake would disappear for long periods of time, making the film even more boring. Even though the movie is only 88 minutes long, at times it feels like hours, with the actors and their inane dialogue--which feels exactly like filler material. For a movie with the term 'trail of blood' in it, I don't want to see people sitting around and talking! (And there's hardly any blood in this one, compared to the last one.)

The only redeeming qualities in Trail Of Blood are the fact that there are the occasional fun scenes. The snake, as bad as it may look, is still pretty awesome, (you gotta love these giant, very fake looking snakes....) and there is some decent action. To bad the entire movie looks like it was filmed with whatever money they had left from the last one.

(And Hasselhoff is missing--he was the fun part of the last one! To top it off, there's even a Hasselhoff look-alike in this one....)

Picking up where "Anaconda 3" left off, "Anacondas: Trail of Blood" is another dreadful CGI monster movie, with occasional amusing distractions. The major distraction is the sheer number of characters. There are at least four groups of mutually disagreeable people roaming in the woods, all serving to either senselessly bloat the film's running time or serve as snake chow. The film opens with a mad scientist making a serum from blood orchids (see "Anaconda 3") that will make snakes regenerate when injured, and will somehow cure rich but evil mogul Murdoch's (John Rhys-Davies) bone cancer. (Right.) Murdoch wants that serum, and dispatches a Romanian hit man and his team to kill the researcher and if necessary his lovely assistant, Amanda (Crystal Allen, who looks better than most people in fatigues.)

This sets into motion the primary motive factor of the film: walking around in the woods. The snake is rarely seen, and when it is, it is hilarious. I especially like the long-focus silhouette shots of it eating bad guys. Amanda meets Alex (Calin Stanciu,) a student paleontologist who is also independently walking around in the woods near Bucharest. Alex is perhaps the character I sympathize most with in the film, and as his reward he comes away unscathed at the end. Next up a wholly loathsome group of anthropology researchers are on a field trip for business and pleasure. You will know you can't tolerate them as soon as the worst car dancing scene in history ("I am a slave to rhythm.") unveils itself. You will literally be counting the minutes until they meet the snake. It takes longer than you think. While Amanda is trying to blow up a secret greenhouse, the anthropologists make a grisly discovery at a camp. Since there were gruesome killings at the camp, they just decide to hang out there. Crystal explains a lot in flashbacks and in contrived exposition, while over in the anthropologist camp there is a spider bite requiring emergency surgery. Oh the dramatic loose ends!

Meanwhile Alex has lost his keys, and decided to spend the night in his car: in short order we learn that Crystal Allen is apparently also a stunt driver, that giant snakes scream like little girls, and that the best way to avoid a super-fast predator is to run out of protective buildings and into open fields. Disparate groups fleeing the serpent join up and then split up for seemingly no reason; the accents of the local actors really get difficult to understand, especially when they are screaming, so you know it's exciting! Great leaps of logic occur with startling frequency. Question: if you are holding a machine gun, and a giant snake is slithering towards you, do you fire at the snake in an attempt to kill or injure it, or do you fire wildly into the air, aiming at nothing to allow the snake the best possible chance to eat you whole? Obviously, you fire into the air.

Eventually everybody winds up together in the camp, and Crystal won't give up the serum until the goons threaten Alex, so she agrees to go get it for them. This involves a lot of amusing subplots including a secret compartment in a bedroom floor, a hilarious and awkward kiss distraction, a pointless grenade suicide, and even a scene which harkens back to "Jaws" as its muse. There's quite incredible gunplay in a tent, Murdoch's short-lived cure, and fisticuffs aplenty. There's self-sacrifice, a ludicrous floral coda, and action ending, with lots of people proving that you can get shot and get right back up as if nothing happened. I will not reveal the totally gratuitous conclusion that actually makes the title technically correct and invites yet another sequel, but I hope that Amanda retires and teaches botanical herpetology at a local community college somewhere, because they need someone with real world experience.

Sure, "Anacondas: Trail of Blood" is bad, but did you expect otherwise? The CGI is lamentable, the acting terrible, the premise and meandering disjointed plot are not focused, but there are moments of over-the-top camp value that fans of cinematic cheese will appreciate if they are in the mood.

I truly don't get why alot of reviewers are so hard on these kinds of movies. To look for somekind of high-budget masterpiece here is like climbing a tree in search of a fish!

First, this is a made for tv movie and it is a b-movie/(small-budget).

For what it is Anacondas: Trail of Blood is not bad.

The story takes place in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe, some rich guy wants to live long and overcome his physical condition so he invests lots of money in some kind of private out of the way pharmaceutical lab to extract from an orchid plant a promising new drug. The lab experiments with snakes and a side effect is a very big hungry snake that breaks loose in the local surrounding woods eating people! Scientist lady and team go out to find it and destroy it.

Yeah, that's it folks - Anacondas: Trail of Blood dosen't pretend to be some important movie that's going to set a new standard for the movie world or change the world. And that's exactly why i liked it. I get tired of self-important big "showcase" movies. Now the story does carry a sort of message like; 'don't mess with nature' - a Frankenstein kind of thing but without preaching about it.

Bottom line; I found this movie to be scary good fun. Just don't get to hung-up on how good or bad the CGI is, and you might very well enjoy it. The people and relationships in it are interesting; especially that of Amanda's platonic love for Alex and the more romantic love of Jackson & Heather and the age difference between these adults. (I'm guessing Amanda is in her early 30s and Alex is about 21/Jackson 40 and Heather 25?). Both of these relationships are portrayed in a meaningful way.

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is also good.

Shot back-to-back with terrible "Anaconda 3: The Offspring," the fourth installment "Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood" is slightly better than its predecessor. That's what reviewers say and, yes, they are right. At least there are no useless "anaconda hunters" that only made the entire film look so stupid (not in the good sense). Still this time technically things are not much better as most of the actions lack tension and special effects still look so cheap. Most disappointingly the film is poorly written with a dearth of action.

Once again Crystal Allen stars as Dr. Amanda Hayes, a gun-toting scientist (and explosives expert) determined to stop all that she has foolishly created in the laboratory owned by a dying billionaire Mr. Murdoch (John Rhys-Davies). In the meanwhile, Mr. Murdoch hires a group of mercenaries to obtain what he thinks is his property - serum that can cure him of any disease. Also, Mr. Murdoch orders them to take care of Dr. Hayes should they come across her.

The problem is, of course, there is a giant snake at large in the woods of the Carpathians, where Amanda (guarded by two soldiers), the mercenaries and other characters including unsuspecting research team members walk around, looking for what they want.

Unfortunately for us, nothing big happens in the first half of the film. Obviously it was a bit tough for director Don E. FauntLeRoy to handle all these characters and narrative threads simultaneously. They walk, talk, sleep (or lose consciousness) and walk and talk again and we don't have many actions involving anaconda for which the film was made.

Though the film gets a little better in the second half, where things start moving faster, flat and inept direction kills potential "campy" fun the film's cheesy effects could have provided. Actors are doing their best, but "Anaconda 4" remains bad throughout, and this "bad" is not something you can enjoy watching as it was in the first "Anaconda" film with the scenery-chewing Jon Voight.

this movie is great because it
has more gore,more creature
violence,more explosions.and
the most important thing an ok
ending.so give more good reviews
ok.

I had the nerve to think that Anaconda 3 was bad! That movie is a blockbuster compared to Anaconda 4. Anaconda 4 picks up where 3 left off and to be honest, this movie is just as bad if not worse! The only positive element in the movie is Linden Ashby. I think that he is a really good actor and he should definetly be in better movies than this! just in case you are asking yourself "if Anaconda 3 was so bad then why did you get 4?" I purchased them both at the same time so I did not know what a huge mistake I was making. By the way the special effects also SUCK BIGTIME in this movie.

Length:: 1:36 Mins

Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood: 4 out of 10: Anaconda 4 has some surprisingly effective scenes in its 88 minutes.


There is a car chase towards the end of the film; first of all, the snake is chasing a car all the while a gun fight erupts among the passengers and an intruder. There is also a silhouetted chase on a sunset drenched hill between three groups of characters that have no prior knowledge of each other with the snake in the mix. Heck, there are even some tender moments between an older gun toting woman and a blond man-child lost in the woods as a snake watches them.

Much like a previous incarnation, (Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Red Orchid) this movie comes awfully close to not needing the snake at all. In fact it, dare I say it, a removal of the anaconda may have made Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood a slightly better film.


The non-snake stuff is fairly simple. John Rhys-Davies, in full "pick up a paycheck" mode, is a bad guy with bone cancer who has financed a cure which involves genetically altering snakes. He hires a hit man (who brings along six friends who cannot shoot straight and twirl their mustaches) to inexplicably kill the lead scientist (who has disappeared, translation: has been eaten.) The assassin is also asked to kill a blond chick played by Crystal Allen. She acts like an old west gunslinger but is apparently a herpetologist. The blond chick meanwhile is setting explosives in an orchid bed located in one of those ridiculously well lit caves with light bulbs placed at foot long intervals, burning 24/7. She runs into what appears to be a fifteen year old boy whom immediately becomes her love interest in a weird Private Lessons kind of twist. He is looking for the base camp where some other unrelated (non-giant snake creating) scientists are digging up a frozen body out of a UFO or something.

Like I said the snakes are almost crowded out of their own movie. It is probably for the best. While the CGI is better than many other killer snake movies this is damning with faint praise indeed. The snakes in question don't look like anacondas or even snakes at all. Replacing shark fins with bear claws does not make the shark scarier. And giving anacondas silly rows of oversized teeth and the ability to regenerate like the T-1000 (Terminator 2 Judgement Day) does not make them any scarier.

Oh, and while I picked on the first movie for having anacondas in a jungle, they are after all swamp and marsh dwellers; and picked on the second movie for having them in Borneo, which is in Asia last I checked; I don't have words to begin to describe the jaw-dropping silliness of Anacondas in Romania. The Carpathians in fall do not create the proper snake attack vibe unless it is a 60 foot cottonmouth. Also a note to the Sci-fi Channel: If I see 'Bear-Shark Claws of Death' on your channel anytime soon I'm coming after you guys. I'm just giving a friendly warning here.

More herpetological havoc ensues when a greedy capitalist (John Rhys-Davies) sponsors misguided scientists into genetically engineering a giant supersnake.

I really missed Hasselhoff in this one. Perhaps that in itself is a potent indicator of how far this franchise has sunk. There's still some goofy fun in it if you're in the mood to laugh at a bad movie. Every time the snake appears, it seems to be a different size. I enjoyed the shot of a pit full of bloody corpses that were breathing so heavily that they might have just completed a marathon.