Starring Johnny Messner and Morris Chestnut. Rated 14A.

It's never a good sign when the best actor in a motion picture happens to be a monkey. For those of you who are now recalling W. C. Fields's famous dictum about the foolishness of performing with kids and critters, it's only fair to point out that the monkey in question isn't that good either. This is because Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is a really, really bad movie.

If nothing else, its seven-year-old ancestor was fun. What cult-movie fan can ever forget the sight of a screamingly awful digital serpent spewing a smirking Jon Voight onto a heaving deck? Anaconda's trash was high-spirited, almost joyful. It had the I-can't-believe-I'm-getting-paid-for-this ebullience of Hong Kong action flicks from the 1980s.

What The Hunt for the Blood Orchid has is a lot of outsize slitherers, zero characterization, and dialogue so wooden that it's a miracle no one got splinters from mouthing lines.

The orchid in question--a McGuffin if ever there was one--is a flower that blooms every seven years in the jungles of Borneo. This rare plant, it seems, might be able to prolong human life to unprecedented lengths. But there are several catches: the flower must be harvested quickly, it can only be reached by boat, and Borneo is experiencing its rainy season--although you wouldn't know this when the cast is actually on the water--when no reputable mariner would risk his craft. Fortunately, there is always the odd disreputable mariner, and one is soon hired to find this "pharmaceutical fountain of youth".

Then the chomping begins.

For the most part, this movie is so hackneyed it is not above having its hero wrestle a rubber crocodile. The only narrative innovation of which Anacondas can boast is having the mandatory hysterical white woman played by a whimpering black male. (And didn't anyone connected to the film know that anacondas are native only to South America?)

At times like this, I try to turn my chronometer back to age 14 to see if I might have liked this movie then. The answer this time is no. Even at that age, I would have seen not a big snake but a giant turkey.