The Exorcist/Anacondas

Hell is for zeroes: Exorcist: The Beginning offers excessive gore and sunny Catholicism

"You don't want to walk on water/ You just want to walk all over me"--Counting Crows

Ignored by atheists and doubted by agnostics, God is usually slandered by his followers. Zealots kill in His name, wholly committed believers denounce all pleasurable sex and the newly converted sing His praises in the most unlikely ways. Consider Exorcist: The Beginning, a repulsive, shallow and pretentious valentine to the redemptive power of the Catholic Church. After defiling the eyes and ears of viewers for two hours, the movie swiftly banishes evil from an accursed African village and ends with a swooning glimpse of the Vatican.

Written by Alexi Hawley (from a story by Caleb Carr--that Carr plagiarized from Sophie's Choice) and directed by Renny Harlin, this overwrought atrocity serves as a prequel to the main action that occurred in Washington D. C. in 1973. Set in Africa in 1949, this fourth film in the histrionic, overrated series reintroduces audiences to Father Merrin, the elderly priest originally played by Max Von Sydow. As portrayed by Stellan Skarsgard, Merrin has become an apostate: a swaggering, sodden archaeologist who has denounced God because of the horrors committed by the Nazis during World War II. (Call him: Indiana Groans in the Tempo of Doom.)

Commissioned to find an ancient demonic totem, Merrin ventures to a small village outside Nairobi where he meets "superstitious" natives, a racist British major (Julian Wadham), a comely doctor (Izabella Scorupco) and a boy (Remy Sweeney) apparently possessed by the devil. During these unconvincing theatrics, audiences are bombarded with a flurry of nauseating images: impalings, bullets whistling through skulls and a child torn apart by hyenas. This savagery in the name of religion may have been envisioned as a hosanna to the Catholic faith, but it plays like a snuff film directed by the many pedophiles employed by the Vatican.--Robert Chancey

Snake oil

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is the sort of movie that would have played the bottom half of a drive-in double bill back in the '60s. It's primitively made, sometimes effective, and just the thing to see if you're interested in only occasionally looking at the screen.

Director Dwight H. Little's sequel to the 1997 thriller gives us this big corporate company that has discovered the fountain of youth in the form of a rare blood orchid growing aside a faraway river in Borneo. (As one man astutely notes: "This will be bigger than Viagra!") But when the corporate guys are ready to rent a boat up river, they discover it's the rainy season. Too dangerous--except for the mighty Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner) who's a lovable, virile codger with a couple of swell tattoos. He guarantees their safety for extra dough.

But now this great big snake is starting to eat up the passengers. At first Bill figures it's just one snake. But then he remembers: It's the mating season! And that means lots and lots of snakes! So Johnson keeps telling corporate bigwig Jack Byron (Matthew Marsden) that they ought to go back. Byron is obsessed with staying the course and becoming rich. Can you guess how it ends? Can you guess the film's moral?

Kadee Strickland plays a research assistant, but she's really in the film so that she can be ogled by Nicholas Gonzalez, playing a studly doctor who keeps courting Strickland's breasts as if he were a salivating preadolescent crashing a frat party.

Salli Richardson-Whitfield is the bitch female scientist. When there are professional women characters in films like this, there's always at least one bitch whom we know should be home birthing babies instead of competing with men.

When the giant snakes make their brief, digital appearances, it's fun to see the characters get eaten up. It's the people who remain alive and talking that may disturb the viewer.--Anthony Del Valle