IMDB’s description:
A biology teacher [trying] to save his ill daughter with a natural cure goes into the jungle with experts and finds a horror that’s larger than life
This movie opens during World War 2. A platoon of Japanese soldiers are exploring a jungle. Suddenly one of them comes flying out of the tree line. A giant snake (like something out of Harry Potter) emerges and commences to kill the platoon.
Where Steven Spielberg learned less is more in Jaws and Jurassic Park when it comes to revealing the monsters. This movie goes the other route, revealing the big monster less than 1 minute into the film (a film that is only 79 total minutes in length).
Jump forward to the present we are in an elementary classroom. The teacher is trying to convince his child students to buy his book about prehistoric animals and plants. He mentions a giant snake. Then he takes out a small snake and lets it kill a mouse in his hands. The kids all scream (and for some reason there is a panel of adults in the back). The teacher is promptly fired.
The various IMDB like pages are so sparse for this movie and its actors bios so brief I can’t be sure of the main character’s name. For the sake of this movie I will call him Dr. Grant. Just after being fired Dr. Grant returns home and two men show up. We’ll call them… Gennaro and Hammond. Hammond has read Dr. Grant’s book and has discovered a secret island where a giant… not snake, but something called a blood apple (which bears no resemblance to the actual fruit) might exist. The blood apple is the fountain of youth and can cure cancers. Hammond believes in the myth because he found one of the Japanese soldiers who survived the opening scene and he is now over 124 years old. Hammond is dying from throat cancer, and Dr. Grant’s daughter is dying from bone cancer.
Hammond agrees to fund Dr. Grant’s dig for an additional three years (basically that) and away they go. Now they are on a boat. There are a bunch of mercenaries, Dr. Grant, the lady doctor (not an OBGYN) whom we will call Dr. Sattler, an overweigh geologist we will call Nedry, and a few other cursory characters. As they approach the island they enter a very dense fog, Dr. Grant says something like “this kind of fog should only happen during the monsoons, and it isn’t the monsoons.”
A man accidentally cuts his hand and suddenly out of the darkness a fish latches onto him. It is a flying piranha, and now the sky if full of them, killing the mercenaries in mass. This scene goes on for a long time. Too long, one might say. The fish can eat through steel cans but cannot get through a glass windshield or pieces of wood. Eventually Dr. Grant wraps a coat with blood and throws it in the air, allowing him and Dr. Sattler to hid inside the cabin. The boat captain sets the ship to max power and they clear finally the fog and the flock of fish.
They have arrived at Skull Island, oh I mean Isla Sorna. The boat is in bad shape, the captain says it will take three days to fix. Dr. Grants says the jungle is dangerous and they would be safer traveling near the river, but Hammond is eager to find the tree of life and insists they proceed through the jungle on a two day march. As they are walking they get attacked by vines, that ultimately end up being the plant from Little Shop of Horrors (minus the singing). More of the team is killed, but the principal characters remain. Dr. Grant saves the life of a woman mercenary, we’ll call her Lady Muldoon. That evening the few soldiers remaining setup a laser sentry system like Congo. Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler follow some fireflies which went extinct a long time ago. The perimeter goes off, but it is just Nedry taking a dump.
The next morning the team is getting closer to the source of the blood apple tree (which somehow Nedry can pinpoint on his laptop) when they get attacked by a giant snake. Finally! After a few minutes of battling the snake (which is bullet proof it seems) in which several of the people die one of the soldiers throws a grenade into the mouth of the snake and kills it. Immediately following this they find a nest with large snake eggs. The soldiers do the only smart thing in the movie and immediately destroy the nest. Literally seconds after they leave the nest, an even bigger snakes goes across the screen right where they were. Why didn’t it attack right then? Because this movie needs to stretch its meager runtime out. The captain of the boat and a girl who just takes photos catches up with the team, the boat was attacked by a giant snake, a different one from the one they just killed. We see a short shot of the snake stalking the humans with predator vision, for some reason.
The team finally reaches the tree and seconds later the fruit blossoms on the trunk. Hammond orders a soldier to climb the tree to get it. Just as he is about to grab the fruit the bigger snake shows up and eats him. Now I thought the soldier would just throw a grenade into this snake’s mouth too, but that would be too easy, and a couple more people die before they try this. Lady Muldoon gets thrown into the jungle, presumed dead. Finally the soldier uses his grenades against the snake, but it is too big and grenade proof.
Hammond forces Dr. Grant to retrieve the apple and then the five remaining people attempt to flee while the last soldier is eaten. Hammond is slow with a cane, so he shoots Gennaro (remember him?) to slow him down and try to keep the snake back. Then he shoots Dr. Sattler in the leg! Dr. Grant moves to grab her and the snake shows up. Instead of just eating as many people as fast as it can (which it has done every time up to this point) for some reason the snake singles out Hammond and coils around him, crushing him to death and then slowly eating him. Dr. Grant recovers the apple and gives it to Dr. Sattler, Nedry, and the photo girl. He tells them to run while he tries to lure the snake away.
He lures it into an area with all these organic explosives in the trees? He tries to throw them to set them off but he fails. Suddenly Lady Muldoon shows up (I suspected she didn’t die) and causes the explosion that supposedly kills the snake, but her as well. Back to the trio with the apple. They are standing in exactly the same place as when Dr. Grant left them. He shows up and they head back to the boat. Remember how the boat needed to be fixed and the captain was chased off the boat so the repairs never happened and then he was ultimately killed? Well the movie doesn’t remember either, because they drive the boat away from the island. Just as the credits roll a giant snake leaps out of the water in front of the camera.
This might worst Jurassic Park remake since Jurassic Park: The Lost World.