MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Despite being a reasonable box office success when it was first released, the 1997 film Anaconda has become something of a cult classic in the almost 30 intervening years, not because it was good, but because it was very, very bad. From its awkwardly written characters, implausible plotting, and scientific nonsense to its unrealistic creature effects, and especially Jon Voight’s wildly unhinged performance, the film is now remembered as – and this is me being very charitable – a ‘camp classic’. However, two genuine fans of the original movie are writer/director Tom Gormican and writer Kevin Etten, and they have now come together to present this film, an action-comedy meta-reboot of the franchise starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd.

Black and Rudd play Doug and Griff, childhood friends from Buffalo, New York, who have long dreamed of becoming filmmakers. While Griff left to become a bit-part actor in Hollywood, Doug stayed home with their other friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and became a wedding videographer. Years later, all are dissatisfied with the way their lives have turned out, but things change when Griff returns home and reveals that he has obtained the rights to one of their favorite films, the 1997 Anaconda, and wants to travel to the Amazon Rainforest to make a low-budget indie version of the film. However, immediately upon their arrival in Brazil, things start to go wrong, and before long the group finds themselves in a real-life adventure involving a real-life giant snake that really wants to eat them.

The film is a hoot, a fun action comedy which pitches the antics of Jack Black and Paul Rudd against some genuinely exciting action sequences involving not only a cool CGI snake but also some murderous illegal gold miners, and which also features an extended meta-cameo by Ice Cube reprising his role from the original 1997 film. The film is also surprisingly beautiful at times, with cinematographer Nigel Bluck making excellent use of the lush and verdant rain forests of Queensland, Australia, standing in for the Amazon. Director Gornican clearly likes the meta-genre, as his last film was The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, another action-comedy in which Nicolas Cage played a parody version of himself.

The score for Anaconda is by composer David Fleming, and caps off an excellent 2025 for him, during which he wrote excellent music for films such as The Alto Knights, Americana, and Eternity, and enjoyed a massive box office success with director James Gunn’s Superman reboot. The score was recorded in Australia, conducted by the great Christopher Gordon, and features a large orchestra bolstered by synths, plus ethnic instruments including flutes and pan-pipes by Pedro Eustache, guitars by Juan Luqui, and other specialist Brazilian instruments curated by composer Antonio Teoli.

The primary identity in the score is a simple, but brilliantly catchy and memorable three-note motif for woodwinds that is introduced right at the beginning of the excellent opening cue, “The Anaconda Adventure,” and appears in basically every cue thereafter. It’s been quite some time since I experienced an ear-worm as persistent as Fleming’s Anaconda motif, but it has been with me since the moment I heard it and, as of the time of writing, appears it will be stuck there… I guess, forever, at this point. But while the construct of the piece may be simple, what Fleming does with it is not. As the score develops he surrounds it with a wonderful array of South American textures including the aforementioned guitars, a range of percussion items, and then in its best moments, the might of the full orchestra.

Emerging out of this main motif is a longer and more expansive melodic idea which represents the ‘sense of adventure’ inherent in the story, and has a positive, open sound that romanticizes the beauty of the jungle and the Amazon River, and the idealism of Doug and Griff as they set off to follow their dreams. The theme features prominently in the aforementioned “The Anaconda Adventure,” and it’s also worth noting the clever retro synth vibe variation in “The Quatch VHS.”

The three-note motif and the longer theme then appear throughout a great deal of the rest of the score, including standout tracks like the upbeat and enthusiastic “Welcome to Brazil,” the expansive “Aboard the Benedita,” the more pensive “Ana in the Amazon,” the broadly dramatic and sweeping “EPK,” and the determined “Up the River” which features some prominent guitar work and rich percussion sounds. There is a wonderfully nostalgic, throwback 1990s vibe to this whole thing that I very much appreciate. At times I got flavors of Hans Zimmer (things like Beyond Rangoon, or parts of Green Card), whereas at other times I got flavors of James Newton Howard’s Outbreak, and even Jerry Goldsmith’s Congo, all of which should give you an idea of the overall sound.

The only other significant idea in the score is a dangerous-sounding growling bass motif for the deadly anaconda snake itself, which often appears in horror-heavy cues like “Very Snakey,” “Wrap on Heitor,” and “Ssh!” Elsewhere, lively, exotic rhythms feature prominently as part of action cues like “Double Headbutt,” the aforementioned “Ana in the Amazon,” the rambunctious and dynamic “Snakebites & Dirtbikes,” and the brilliantly over-the-top heroism of “Pee Shy”.

By the time the finale rolls around both the three-note main motif and the snake motif have been embedded into a series of action cues that underscore the conclusive sequence where Doug and Griff and the gang take on the giant anaconda amid the ruins of a smashed location film set. The climatic trio of cues comprising “Snake n’ Bacon,” “Big Hollywood Ending,” and “Gold Cart Technology” are lively and fun, and often work in some bossa nova rhythms that imbue the score with a touch of the carnaval, and then the final burst of the main theme in “Not On My Watch Mister” is satisfyingly epic.

I also want to note the excellent “Doug’s Pitch,” which starts out with Jack Black reading aloud the action lines of a fictional screenplay, before switching to Black singing and scatting the ‘imagined score’ in the scene, and then Fleming taking over with an orchestrated version of the score that Black was just singing. It’s very clever. I also very much appreciated the quick burst of Randy Edelman’s main theme from the 1997 Anaconda in one of the film’s key scenes (you’ll know it when you hear it), although I was a touch disappointed that it didn’t make the album.

Anaconda is a fun, self-aware, loving homage to the film that inspired it, and in many ways you can classify David Fleming’s score using the same terms, but what makes the score stand out more, for me, are two key things: sincerity, and nostalgia. The central three-note motif, and the expanded adventure theme, are both genuinely good in their own right, and Fleming’s sincere desire to score the film properly and (mostly) without irony was the right one. The way he blends the orchestra with the pan flutes, guitars, and other regional instruments is genuinely excellent, and in the moments that the score rises over the majestic Amazon, the whole thing soars. The nostalgia part then comes from Fleming’s tendency to score the film in a defiantly 1990s way: the themes are recognizable, properly orchestrated, front-and-center in the sound mix, and are not afraid to bring an authentic emotional quality to the table, and that’s not something you can say too often these days. As such, for me, all these things make Anaconda one of the best comedy scores of 2025.

Buy the Anaconda soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• The Anaconda Adventure (4:46)
• Doug’s Pitch (1:02)
• The Quatch VHS (1:39)
• Welcome To Brazil (1:10)
• Double Headbutt (1:30)
• B+ Life (1:25)
• Very Snakey (2:14)
• Aboard The Benedita (2:33)
• Wrap On Heitor (1:35)
• Snakeity Snake (0:50)
• Ana In The Amazon (3:03)
• Shh! (2:08)
• Snakebites & Dirtbikes (1:44)
• EPK (2:51)
• The RIghts (1:51)
• Up The River (1:32)
• Pee Shy (1:26)
• The Birds Don’t Sing They Screech In Pain (1:39)
• The Harmony of Nature (0:52)
• Snake n’ Bacon (1:53)
• Big Hollywood Ending (0:54)
• Golf Cart Technology (1:31)
• Not On My Watch Mister (1:57)
• The Anaconda Adventure – Manaus Outtake (Tchutchuca) (0:37)

Madison Gate Records (2025)

Running Time: 42 minutes 33 seconds

Music composed by David Fleming. Conducted by Christopher Gordon. Orchestrations by Abraham Libbos, Gregory Jamrok, Joseph Zimmerman, Zach Zach Yaholkovsky, Cara Batema, Brendan Moriak, Michael Kallin, Andrew Rowan, Max Fourmy and Juan Arboleda. Additional music by Forest Christenson, Jake Boring, Aldo Arechar, Aniruddh Immaneni and David Naroth. Featured musical soloists Pedro Eustache, Juan Luqui, Antonio Teoli, Tércio Macambira de Vasconcelos, João Paula de Souza Ribeiro, Ronalto Alves De Jesus and Igor Lima Brasil. Recorded and mixed by Craig Beckett and Scott Michael Smith. Edited by Chris Newlin. Album produced by David Fleming.