In Anaconda, an eclectic cast of good actors badly feign terror as they run from a giant rubber tube made to look like a snake. The transparently awful digital effects indicate that the snake was also played by a computer program designed and bankrolled by the Sci-Fi Channel. As for the actors, they are entirely real -- and so, I imagine, were their paychecks.

The movie has grown to become one of the premier bad movies of the last decade, as it simultaneously turned on camp-loving geek boys and reviled everyone else in such an entertaining way that the film is still a valid conversation piece. Some say the movie works as great trash. Others contend that it is a fun, modern grindhouse flick. I stand on the side of reason when I say there is no way Anaconda should be spoken or written in the same sentence as words like "good" or "works," and no way it should be considered watchable except if one intends to write a review eviscerating its every last aspect.

The plot is simple enough for a grade-schooler to have written it (although the film's ridiculous, violent action set pieces preclude grade-schoolers from actually being able to see the movie) -- a National Geographic-type crew sets off into the Amazon jungle in an attempt to film a documentary about tribal natives. En route, they save a drowning snake hunter with several loose screws. Then the crew's fearless leader has the consciousness sucked out of him by an exotic insect, leaving the door open for the snake hunter to take over the expedition. His quest: to capture the "world's largest anaconda." I think my sons made a movie with that exact plot using action figures and toy cars. It was more effective, I think, because their movie's effects precisely matched the intellectual level of its story.

Anaconda unfolds with all the on-the-nose deliberateness of a direct-to-video cheesefest that takes itself way too seriously. And in truth, it seems like this movie is the chief inspiration for every movie the Sci-Fi Channel produces and broadcasts, from the annoying disaster music to the walking-prop characters to the cartoony, mustache-twirling villains to the heinous special effects. In this case, it's Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube who fill the running, screaming cardboard cut-out roles, supported by the likes of Eric Stoltz, Kari Wuhrer, and a young Owen Wilson. The psychotic villain is played by Jon Voight, infusing the character with all the affected Jon Voight-iness that he can muster. They all deserve to get eaten for agreeing to take part in such a disaster, in which the most intriguing character is the snake itself -- if for no other reason than it looks so bad that I kept wondering where the film's $45 million budget went.

Peruvian "auteur" Luis Llosa, mastermind of countless dead-end Peruvian television series, directed Anaconda. He has not, in the intervening 12 years since the film's release, directed another film of note (nor another film at all, save one Peruvian thriller that has never been released), a factoid that speaks way more about Llosa's career than I ever could in this review. The film was written by three -- yes, three -- men: Hans Bauer, Jim Cash, and Jack Epps Jr. The only prominent credit on any of their resumes in the past decade is this film's unfortunate sequel, 2004's Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, although Bauer is credited with writing a couple direct-to-video thrillers. As for the actors, they have done a better job of surviving the Anaconda disaster, and I am thankful for their efforts -- they simultaneously allow those actors, and critics like me, to forget that a movie like Anaconda ever existed.