Watch ‘Anaconda’ With a Straight Face (We Dare You)

“When you can’t breathe,” the ads for “Anaconda” sternly warn, “you can’t scream.” But nobody said anything about laughing.

Though it’s not clear if the humor is intentional or whether its audience will be limited to connoisseurs of movies born to be bad, “Anaconda” is such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Lots of effort, not to say money, went into turning out impressive 40-foot snakes in both animatronic and computer-generated versions, snakes so nasty they’d swallow both you and a friend without a second thought. There’s even a gruesome shot from inside a snake’s mouth as it’s about to ingest a luckless victim. Let Wes Craven try to top that.

But all this hard work is as nothing against the presence of Jon Voight, who gives an irresistible performance, overripe to the point of bursting, as Paul Sarone, native of Paraguay and snake hunter of mystery. Those with fond memories of Voight as a convict so fierce he had to be welded to his cell in Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Runaway Train” can get ready for another round.

Sarone is not initially on the passenger list for the plucky riverboat that chugs its way down the mighty Amazon. In charge is Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz), an expert in looking effete and finding lost tribes. It’s the Shirishama he’s after this time out; that’s right, “the elusive people of the mist.” And he’s brought a rather diverse film crew with him to document the experience.

The crew’s director is Terri Flores, played by Jennifer Lopez, and, given the success of “Selena,” wouldn’t she give anything to get this one back? Her cameraman is Danny Rich (Ice Cube), who has to be satisfied with sidekick lines like, “That’s it, I’m getting the hell back to L.A.”

Her narrator, Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde), arrives with Cartier suitcases filled with French wine. Gary the sound mixer is Owen Wilson, an accidental tourist on loan from “Bottle Rocket.” And production manager Denise (Kari Wuhrer) is around to model the abbreviated outfits that are just the thing in the steamy jungle.

Just around the Amazon’s first bend, this Ship of Fools comes upon Sarone, stranded on a derelict boat. Snakes are his life, he says, and he’s soon the life of the party with tales of his old pal, the anaconda. “It holds you tighter than your true love,” he says, courtesy of the Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. script, “and you get the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of their embrace causes your veins to explode.” Thanks, guys, I needed that.

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Possibly having gotten a peek at the rest of the script, Stoltz’s Dr. Cale beats a strategic retreat and spends much of the movie breathing uncertainly under a gauze tent. With the doctor gone, no one else on board can handle Sarone, even after it’s clear that he will stop at nothing, nothing do you hear, in his mad quest to bring one of those 40-foot anacondas back alive.

Neither, under the uncertain direction of jungle veteran Luis “Fire in the Amazon” Llosa, are any of the other performers capable of standing toe-to-toe in the acting department with the force of nature that is Voight in overdrive.

With a sinister leer always playing over a face like a gnarled tree root, Voight’s snarling-scowling performance is one of those leaps into the void that must be seen to be appreciated, kind of like watching “The Wolf Man’s” wizened crone Maria Ouspenskaya come back to life as a pumped-up desperado.

The screenwriters have also given Sarone all the good lines. Or at least they seem good in Voight’s nominally Paraguayan accent. “Don’t make me out a monster, I didn’t eat the captain,” Sarone plaintively croaks in a moment matched by the scene where he runs his admiring hands through a tangle of young snakes and purrs, “Come on, babies. So young, so lethal.”

As they strove to hang onto their sanity in this bizarre mix, the actors in “Anaconda” must have identified with the sentiments of Lopez’s film director, who brought down the house in one preview screening when she said, “This film was supposed to be my big break and it turned out to be a big disaster.” It’s a jungle out there, kids, and don’t you forget it.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for intense adventure violence, and for brief language and sensuality. Times guidelines: close-ups of malevolent snake heads, snakes violently attacking human heads and a shot of a regurgitated human.

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‘Anaconda’

Jennifer Lopez: Terri Flores

Ice Cube: Danny Rich

Jon Voight: Paul Sarone

Eric Stoltz: Dr. Steven Cale

Jonathan Hyde: Warren Westridge

Owen Wilson: Gary Dixon

Kari Kuhrer: Denise Kaberg

A CL Cinema Line Films Corp. production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Luis Llosa. Producers Verna Harrah, Leonard Rabinowitz, Carole Little. Executive producer Susan Ruskin. Screenplay Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. Cinematographer Bill Butler. Editor Michael R. Miller. Costume supervisor Kathy Monderine. Music Randy Edelman. Production design Kirk M. Petruccelli. Art director Barry Chusid. Set decorator Daniel L. May. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.