‘Beware Boiúna’ Movie Review: This Giant Snake Movie Makes Giant Snake Movies Scary-Fun Again
Photo from Lionsgate
From Jeremy Kibler
There really aren’t too many good Giant Snake Movies out there. Calling Anaconda “good” might be subjective (*whispers* it IS objectively great), but it’s the gold standard for creature features that take themselves seriously while remaining self-aware enough to avoid becoming a complete SyFy Original cheesefest. Beware Boiúna clears that low bar, and it might be the unofficial Anaconda reboot we wanted instead of the meta 2025 goof starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, which thought it was a lot cleverer than it was. Mike P. Nelson’s gnarly, thrilling Beware Boiúna takes itself deadly seriously, and that’s precisely why it works.
Jessica Rothe (the breakout star of the Happy Death Day movies) plays Alli, an idealistic med student on a humanitarian mission with two doctors to treat malaria in Colombian villages. Also aboard their boat are tough deckhand Lena (Kiana Madeira), searching for her missing brother, and captain Raúl (Jaime Newball), who’s been like a father to her. When tensions flare between Alli and a group of drunken colonizers (led by Logan Marshall-Green), self-defense leads to a death, the death leads to a cover-up, and the cover-up brings the legendary Boiúna out of the woodwork. A mythical beast of enormous size and queen of the Amazon, Boiúna decides who lives and who dies. (She’s a decisive lady.)
Director Mike P. Nelson, who has already rebooted Wrong Turn and Silent Night, Deadly Night, and writer Tony Giglio make you wait for the Big-Ass Snake to constrict her prey, however, the prickly dynamic between humanitarians and medical professionals is compelling enough in the meantime. Nelson also nails the gritty, sweaty atmosphere, delivering a highlight of quietly trembling terror when a character trapped in muddy quicksand must stay perfectly calm as Boiúna slithers on by.
The trick to withholding your monster for a while can be a win and a loss; with Jaws, of course, it was a win, but then when the big nasty in most creature features gets too much of a close-up, the feeling of any threat is drained. When the titular Boiúna does strike, these attacks are lighted darkly, shot frenetically and cut to ribbons, bringing back not-so-lovely memories of the killer-croc movie Primeval. Maybe that’s a workaround for budget constraints and uneven CGI, but director Nelson makes the approach work well enough, turning the chaos into a shrewd way to amp up the panic-ridden intensity that Boiúna is enormous and ready to do damage.
Besides Ms. Boiúna, there are just enough characters worth caring about, particularly Rothe’s do-gooder Alli and Lena, played by the eminently watchable Madeira with a guardedness and primal Ellen Ripley energy. (If you don’t, you should remember her from the Fear Street trilogy.) Logan Marshall-Green leans hard into the repellent menace of Brennan, his Billy Zane-like human villain, providing more depth than the script necessarily provides.
Beware Boiúna has a little more in common with the overtly comedic Anaconda reboot than one might except, between the gold-mining bad guys to a similar location for the big finale. It’s kind of a crime thriller with a big snake thrown into the mix. It’s also about colonialism without getting too heavy-handed, but yes, it’s still mainly about a big snake chasing people in the Amazon. When it’s sidestepping safe predictability more than a few times, Beware Boiúna manages to put the danger back into the Giant Snake Movie.
Rating: 3/5
Beware Boiúna is currently in theaters.
