Megaboa – 2021 – Eric Roberts
On the cover art of Megaboa, there’s one name and that’s Eric Roberts. That ought to tell you two things. First, of all, he’s the only actor in the movie that has some kind of big attracting name. And Second, the movie probably won’t be much good since his name is seldom associated with quality films these days. An third, well, there actually is a third thing you should realize – He won’t have very much screen time.
All of the above is true of course. I have actually seen worse giant snake movies and there are a lot of them. Usually, the snakes or whatever creatures they feature aren’t very well made. Practical effects are out of the question. It’s all CGI these days. And when they make the creatures so large, it’s hard to keep perspective. Depending on camera angles the huge creatures tend to look different sizes from shot to shot. In this case, maybe there are several snakes but I don’t think so. There should be one main giant snake. But even if they’re not huge CGI can spoil it big time for you. Just look at the film Anaconda, which I actually thought was pretty good. With those animated snake scenes it would’ve been so much better.
But beggars can’t be choosers. You know what you’re getting yourself into when you start to watch a movie like Megaboa. You’re not in it for the quality, you’re in it for the entertainment and probably for the laughs. I tend to think of entertainment and quality as opposite ends on a big U. On the top left side is everything good qualitywise. It’s a perfect movie in every sense. Good script, good acting, perfect score, and so on. On the right top side of the U, you have entertainment because every element of quality is gone. It got turkey qualities and it’s very entertaining in that sense. Then there are movies that drop down from both ends of the U and when that happens everything is beyond saving. There are no quality values and there are no entertainment values. it’s just boooring.
In the case of Megaboa, I think that we’re on the right side of the U. There’s definitely entertainment value caused by the horrible acting and the terrible script. The CGI is surprisingly good but that alone can’t carry the story from being totally absurd. I don’t really know what is the worst. The annoying characters that are so stupid or the actors that don’t seem to care that they are about to die and actually are in deep shit. Well, at least the annoying ones tried to act. What the others, including Eric Roberts, were doing there, I don’t know. I mean it couldn’t have been a very well-paid gig. The question is what the salary was? I bet he got twice as much as the other for doing half as much.
But it’s a fun movie if you can keep your distance from it and don’t take it too seriously. You can laugh at the terrible acting and all the clichés. That oughta count for something. At least it’s entertainment value. Oh yeah, there are spiders too!
