Hollywood has been exploiting ophidiophobia for 100 years. Sounds esoteric, but it's a slam-dunk scare. The phobia involves people's irrational fear of snakes.

According to Dutch phobia expert Jan Heering, seeing a snake or even just thinking about a snake, can result in these symptoms: Breathlessness, dizziness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly, a fear of dying, becoming mad or losing control, a sensation of detachment from reality or a full blown anxiety attack.

Jeez, sounds just like what happens to the hapless characters in director Dwight Little's monster movie Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid, a sort-of sequel to the 1997 movie in which Jon Voight becomes a gastronomic nightmare.

Overblown and full of nature-science flubs and outright snake lies -- the biggest whoppers I've ever heard about anacondas -- the new movie is one of those guilty pleasures that strides boldly along the fine line between complete crap and cult favourite.

Thanks to the humungous snakes here, all created by computer digital imaging, Anacondas manages to be cultish. It is a slithering sensation of silly fun. So we are talking B-movie status here.

Still, thanks to a decent collection of actors -- some of them disposable enough to feed to the ravenous snakes head-first -- the human part of the film is delivered with more conviction and panache than in most flicks of this genre.

The best of the bunch in Anacondas are KaDee Strickland (as the brainy babe), Johnny Messner (the gruff Bogie-wannabe), Morris Chestnut (the bright but greedy businessman), Karl Yune (the cucumber-cool sidekick) and Matthew Marsden (the mad scientist whose English accent mandates just how insane he will get in an all-American B-movie).

This motley crew ends up in the wilds of Borneo looking for a rare orchid that is supposed to provide fountain-of-youth benefits. Trouble is, the region is infested with giant, man-eating anacondas. And this expedition is abysmally organized.

In real life, of course, green anacondas don't live in Borneo, they don't get as big as the mega-monsters in the movie, and they don't actually consume humans. And no expedition would be this ill-equipped.

But let's be honest. Cult movies have little or no relation to real life. This is not the Discovery Channel. Instead, it's ophidiophobia gone berserk for the sake of cheap yet hilarious thrills that were bloodless enough to rank Anacondas as a PG kiddie flick.

(This film is rated PG)

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