The fall movie season has gotten off to a good start with Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. This movie is the sequel to the surprise hit Anaconda that starred Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube and became a cult classic. The new movie features Morris Chestnut, Salli Richardson and Newcomer KaDee Strickland and has a whole new storyline that has nothing to do with the original movie. But in its first week, it is already becoming a box-office success and shows that sequels can still outdo its origins.

The story involves a group of doctors who set out on an expedition to the island of Borneo to find a rare-blooming ‘blood orchid’ and market it to keep their company from going bankrupt. The orchid is known to grant longer life to whoever feeds from its chemicals. The doctors plan to use the blood orchid for medicinal purposes and become billionaires. But it won’t be as easy as they make it out to be because there is a secret to the orchids; they are safe-guarded by a nest of anacondas, which have fed off the orchids and have grown to gigantic proportions.

A lot of flaws have been noted about this film. One character notes in the film that “Anacondas are territorial,” but anacondas are not found in Borneo, but in South America. A lot of people have also been thrown off because the snakes are computer animated, but the snakes are supposed to look bigger than in the original movie because they have biologically enhanced themselves by feeding off the blood orchids. This makes the snakes look more dangerous and threatening. The excitement level of this film will make you completely overlook these flaws.

The acting in this film is top-notch and is sure to set these actors out for future work. In a way, it is similar to The Blair Witch Project, as it shows a group of young people eager to go to a dangerous place to find what they are looking for until the events that follow leave them scared to the point of hysteria. After the very first encounter with the snake, we see characters trembling at the mouth and hands, lashing out at each other and even crying in fear, unlike the first movie where it seemed like the antagonist, played by Jon Voight, was a bigger threat that the snake. But in a similar case, the expedition and the characters’ lives are thrown into peril by one of the crew members. This quickly turns the trip into Borneo from a quest for glory to a quest for greed. And there is a lesson to be learned here: greed and selfishness will destroy you one way or another, even if you are being haunted by an anaconda or not, as we see our characters picked off one-by-one as a result of one man’s hidden agendas.

For those of you that still have doubts, I advise you to see this movie. It is playing at Cine Theater.