At the turn of the century the Sci Fi Channel started producing original films with kitschy titles like “Mansquito,” “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” and “Frankenfish.” Most of these movies were not, by conventional standards, good. But the majority had an old-fashioned charm that harkened back to the B-movies of the 1950s, an era when anxieties about unchecked scientific advancement inspired low-budget filmmakers to produce movies about giant mantises, giant gila monsters, and — of course — giant shrews.
None of those mutations were ever going to happen, of course, but if B-movie filmmakers made movies about plausible scenarios, like dying slowly from radiation poisoning, the teenagers at the local drive-in would be too depressed to make out in the backseats of their cherry red Buick Skylarks. So instead we got films about nonsense like giant mollusks, and decades later the trend continued with films about piranhacondas and lavalantulas.
The point is, audiences have not been trained to take movies about giant killer animals seriously. Even the rare big budget versions, like Luis Llosa’s all-star 1997 classic “Anaconda,” are usually so cheesy they ooze smoked gruyère. So you have to give director Mike P. Nelson credit: His giant snake movie “Beware Boiúna” is honest to goodness, nasty, mean-spirited nightmare fuel. It’s the kind of film that could give the giant killer animal genre a good name.
‘Beware Boiúna’ stars Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) as Alli, a medical student on a humanitarian mission in the Amazon. Alli and her cohorts — don’t get too attached — work their way down the river, delivering medicine and removing botflies from people’s backs in stomach-churning closeups. The movie gets to the big snake parts eventually, but first Nelson sets the mood: sweaty and disquieting.
Alli and the rest of her team run into contractors with dubious ethics; they’re surveying the rainforest so they can tear it down properly. When Alli and the boat’s engineer Lena (Kiana Madeira, “Fear Street”) get attacked by one of these goons, they accidentally kill him. Then they toss him in the river, enraging the dead guy’s brother, Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green), who vows revenge.
In real life, “vowing revenge” is a weird thing to do. To this film’s credit, at least one of the guys in Brennan’s party wants no part of it. The rest of them chase our heroes down the Amazon into protected waters, where, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a really huge snake. So huge, in fact, that it’s probably not a natural phenomenon. It might very well be the mythical god Boiúna, a territorial beast who decides who lives and who dies (and almost always chooses “death”).
Boiúna is a panic attack of a monster, so gigantic that it’s almost impossible to completely capture her on camera. This might sound like an excuse to cheap out on the monster effects but Nelson finds a way to make it terrifying. Boiúna is the size of a subway train, but it could lurk anywhere in the dense Amazon jungle. And when it’s underwater, it’s unthinkably fast. There are scenes in “Beware Boiúna” where one of the few characters that makes it to the second half of the film stares in awetruck horror as the monster worms slowly next to them. Even without a wider angle, Nelson forces the audience to drink in the insanity-inducing scale of the scaly behemoth.
There’s not a lot to “Beware Boiúna” from a story perspective, but the script by Nelson, Tony Giglio and Alan B. McElroy efficiently hammers its points, introducing the characters and themes clearly and then throwing a humongous serpent god into the mix. There aren’t many protagonists or villains who stick around long enough to reveal that they have depth, but the ones who do are interesting individuals struggling with their survival instincts, who are genuinely torn about whether saving another person’s life is worth risking their own. The attention paid to these characters’ inner turmoil makes “Beware Boiúna” play like a work of horror, not just a campy popcorn flick.
It’s important not to oversell Nelson’s film just because it’s one of the best giant killer animal movies in a long, long time. For one thing, that’s not a high bar, even though “Beware Boiúna” leapfrogs over it with clearance to spare. It’s just a really, really scary movie about a really, really, really big snake. It’s got great actors who take the material seriously, and the material is good enough to deserve all their effort. It’s about colonialism, and that theme matters. It adds weight to all this nerve-shattering serpent mayhem.
If every movie in the giant killer animal genre was as frightening as “Beware Boiúna,” you’d never look at a giant snake the same way again. Or a giant locust. Or a mansquito. Or a dinocroc. Or a supergator. Or a frankenfish. Or a piranhaconda. Or a lavalantula. Or a sharktopus. Or a pteracuda. Or a whalewolf. Or a…
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