Producers: Brad Fuller, Andrew Form, Kevin Etten and Tom Gormican   Director: Tom Gormican   Screenplay: Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten   Cast: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye, Rui Ricardo Diaz, John Billingsley, Sebastian Sero, Romeo Ellard, Jack Waters, Reagan George and Aimee Bah   Distributor: Columbia Pictures

Grade: D

Ladies and gentlemen, the lump of coal in your Christmas stocking has arrived.  There’s a glimmer of a promising idea behind this wacky combination of homage to and send-up of the 1997 “Jaws” ripoff so bad that many have embraced it as a classic unintended comedy.  But the script by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten is so terrible and Gormican’s direction so lackluster, that it makes “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” their clever if uneven 2022 collaboration, seem like a total fluke.  This intended comedy has fewer laughs than the “serious” horror movie it’s supposedly spoofing.

“Anaconda” also wastes the talents of its two stars, who play long-time buddies Griff (Paul Rudd) and Doug (Jack Black).  They were, as kids in Buffalo, so fascinated by the movies—especially their favorite horror flick “Anaconda”—that they filmed little pictures of their own, most notably a cheesy school project called “The Quatch,” in which, as we see in a brief clip, they (Romeo Ellard and Jack Waters) brought down a rubbery creature.  Their best friends Kenny (Reagan George) and Claire (Aimee Bah) handled the screams in supporting roles.

But Griff and Doug’s childhood dreams of cinematic celebrity have floundered badly.  Griff went off to L.A. to seek stardom as an actor, but his high-water achievement has been some walk-ons in TV series, from which he’s usually fired for trying to make his appearances stand out.  Doug is a wedding videographer back in Buffalo, trying to make his work memorable by adding screwy horror-movie-inspired riffs clients queasily reject.  But his boss (John Billingsley) tells him he’s in line to take over the company, and he’s settled into a reasonably happy home life with his wife Malie (Ione Skye) and son Charlie (Sebastian Sero).

Griff comes back to the hometown for Doug’s surprise birthday party with a gift—a VHS copy of “The Quatch,” which all thought lost.  He also reveals that he’s bought the rights to the Japanese novel on which “Anaconda” was based, and suggests that they go to the Amazon and remake it.  Doug resists but, encouraged by Malie and Charlie—and by the chance to tackle important but unspecified “themes” in the movie–he agrees.  Claire (Thandiwe Newton), who’s apparently harboring a longstanding crush on Griff, with whom she’ll co-star, dips into her savings to cover the meager budget, while Kenny (Steve Zahn) will serve as sort of the line producer and cameraman despite his being a lush who claims to be “Buffalo sober” (just beer, wine, and lighter drinks) and a doofus who can’t do anything right.

Thus prepared, the quartet is off to South America to make what Doug calls “The Anaconda,” and things quickly go wrong.  The boat they’ve hired is unavailable, and so they shove off on one captained by Ana (Daniela Melchior), a beautiful woman being pursued by guys she claims are illegal gold miners.  Santiago (Selton Mello), the snake handler Kenny’s found, is a strange bird with a weird attachment to his charge.  And along the way they encounter some unexpected company—a Hollywood film crew doing an actual sequel to “Anaconda,” and a snake bigger than anything in the 1997 movie.  In time the quartet is on their own in the jungle, running for dear life. 

One might think that with so many plot threads available, not to mention the inevitable revelations, the opportunities for jokes and scares would be plentiful.  But Gormican and Etten flub things atrociously; the movie tries to be both funny and scary but fails miserably on both counts.  In the process Rudd and Black flail about wildly, the one stuck with a character so arrogantly dim that he quickly becomes annoying, and the other reduced to shouting the same feeble lines over and over again.  Newton is totally wasted in an embarrassingly nothing role, the CGI anaconda effects are, to put it mercifully, subpar, and the wild action in the last act is more slapdash than slapstick.

If there’s any saving grace at all in the movie, it comes from Zahn, who returns to his early dazed and confused roots (even if one of his sight gags, involving doing something to save a person infected with snake venom, is appallingly unfunny), and Mello, whose spaced-out snake handler disappears all too soon.  A couple of cameos toward the close—one of which you have to endure the credits crawl to see—are perfunctory.

The look of the picture equals the writing in awfulness, with Steven-Jones-Evans’ cheesy production design given the poor treatment it deserves by Nigel Bluck’s cruddy cinematography; the editing spreads out blame between Craig Alpert and Gregory Plotkin, while David Fleming’s score is monotonous.

It’s obvious what “Anaconda” was aiming for—a main dish of comic zaniness with a side order of scares.  But it’s likely to produce only heartburn.  Maybe a bit of whatever Zahn’s Kenny is having would reduce the pain.                        

Producers: Sarah Bauer, Katie Harkins, Gaspare Interrante, Will Martinko and Matthew Santangelo   Director: Will Martinko   Screenplay: Will Martinko and Tony McCall   Cast: John Brocagh Lynn, Reese Grove, Jelena Uchev, Aidan Everly, J. Emmett O’Hare, Miranda Griffin, Colin Tyrell, Mae Burrus and Marusia Griffin Lynn   Distributor: Breaking Glass Pictures

Grade: D

One might like to be kind to movies made by folks dipping into feature filmmaking for the first time and working on miniscule budgets, but too often things turn out badly.  That’s the case with this scrappy debut from Will Martinko, who’s toiled away on shorts for years.  The script for “Inertia” is built around Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, but it’s his law of gravity that’s really determinative here: the movie crashes to earth with a resounding thud.

The script by Martinko and Tony McCall is a variant on the old sci-fi principle that time travelers must avoid meeting versions of themselves along the way, lest something terrible should result.  In this case, however, the problem is a boy, Roman (John Brocagh Lynn), who’s the offspring of a man from the future and a woman of the present. 

The father is Dmitri (Aidan Everly), a Russian time-traveler who’s also a hit-man.  After a job in the “now” he meets Meriya (Jelena Uchev) and they enjoy a night together before he departs for his own time.  Nine months later she gives birth to Roman, though the event has some major consequences.

Fourteen years later Roman (John Brocagh Lynn) has developed telekinetic powers that he uses to purloin clothes from a thrift shop where Lennon (Reese Grove) is clerking.  The sheltered lad is taken with her and returns to the shop.  They quickly develop a connection and spend time together talking of their dreams and hopes.  In one interlude they take over the loft of a church, where he plays the organ while she sings.  They’re discovered and forced to flee.

Lennon is at odds with her mother, and persuades Roman to help her steal her car and run off together.  But tragedy intervenes: in a crash Lennon dies, and when Roman uses his powers to revive her, Dmitri, who’s returned to see Meriya, is horrified.  The car implodes in a chintzy special effect, and Dmitri explains that his doing so has ripped a hole in the fabric of time and space that threatens to destroy the universe.  Roman, while angry over the situation his parents have placed him in, is intent on finding a way to save the world; the experience has encouraged him to grow up fast.  It must be admitted, though, that his solution avoids any serious explanation.

Much of the cast is weak—both Uchev and Everly are at best tolerable—but Lynn and Grove make a pleasant young couple.  All are hobbled, though, by dialogue that rambles and should have gone through another draft or two.  And the picture suffers from effects that are less than special.  Dmitri explains how Roman’s impetuous act will shatter the cosmos, for instance, by poking a knife through a napkin and then ripping it apart.  Technically, moreover, the movie is quite ragged, with Katie Hawkins’ cinematography scruffy and Martinko’s editing haphazard.

One can explain away the faults of “Inertia” as the result of its meagre budget.  But that doesn’t excuse the incoherence of the script and the mediocre execution.