\u2018Beware Boi\u00fana\u2019 stars Jessica Rothe (\u201cHappy Death Day\u201d) as Alli, a medical student on a humanitarian mission in the Amazon. Alli and her cohorts \u2014 don\u2019t get too attached \u2014 work their way down the river, delivering medicine and removing botflies from people\u2019s backs in stomach-churning closeups. The movie gets to the big snake parts eventually, but first Nelson sets the mood: sweaty and disquieting.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\u2018Digger\u2019 Review: Tom Cruise Gives 110% in This Powerless, Self-Adulating Claptrap<\/a>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Alli and the rest of her team run into contractors with dubious ethics; they’re surveying the rainforest so they can tear it down properly. When Alli and the boat\u2019s engineer Lena (Kiana Madeira, \u201cFear Street\u201d) get attacked by one of these goons, they accidentally kill him. Then they toss him in the river, enraging the dead guy\u2019s brother, Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green), who vows revenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In real life, \u201cvowing revenge\u201d is a weird thing to do. To this film\u2019s credit, at least one of the guys in Brennan\u2019s party wants no part of it. The rest of them chase our heroes down the Amazon into protected waters, where, wouldn\u2019t you know it, there\u2019s a really <\/em>huge snake. So huge, in fact, that it\u2019s probably not a natural phenomenon. It might very well be the mythical god Boi\u00fana, a territorial beast who decides who lives and who dies (and almost always chooses \u201cdeath”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Boi\u00fana is a panic attack of a monster, so gigantic that it\u2019s almost impossible to completely capture her on camera. This might sound like an excuse to cheap out on the monster effects but Nelson finds a way to make it terrifying. Boi\u00fana is the size of a subway train, but it could lurk anywhere in the dense Amazon jungle. And when it\u2019s underwater, it\u2019s unthinkably fast. There are scenes in \u201cBeware Boi\u00fana\u201d where one of the few characters that makes it to the second half of the film stares in awetruck horror as the monster worms slowly next to them. Even without a wider angle, Nelson forces the audience to drink in the insanity-inducing scale of the scaly behemoth.<\/p>\n\n\n There\u2019s not a lot to \u201cBeware Boi\u00fana\u201d from a story perspective, but the script by Nelson, Tony Giglio and Alan B. McElroy efficiently hammers its points, introducing the characters and themes clearly and then throwing a humongous serpent god into the mix. There aren\u2019t many protagonists or villains who stick around long enough to reveal that they have depth, but the ones who do are interesting individuals struggling with their survival instincts, who are genuinely torn about whether saving another person\u2019s life is worth risking their own. The attention paid to these characters\u2019 inner turmoil makes \u201cBeware Boi\u00fana\u201d play like a work of horror, not just a campy popcorn flick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s important not to oversell Nelson\u2019s film just because it\u2019s one of the best giant killer animal movies in a long, long time. For one thing, that\u2019s not a high bar, even though \u201cBeware Boi\u00fana\u201d leapfrogs over it with clearance to spare. It\u2019s just a really, really scary movie about a really, really, really big snake. It\u2019s got great actors who take the material seriously, and the material is good enough to deserve all their effort. It\u2019s about colonialism, and that theme matters. It adds weight to all this nerve-shattering serpent mayhem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If every movie in the giant killer animal genre was as frightening as \u201cBeware Boi\u00fana,\u201d you\u2019d never look at a giant snake the same way again. Or a giant locust. Or a mansquito. Or a dinocroc. Or a supergator. Or a frankenfish. Or a piranhaconda. Or a lavalantula. Or a sharktopus. Or a pteracuda. Or a whalewolf. Or a\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thewrap.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Godzilla-Minus-Zero-Toho-2026.jpg?width=300&height=169&fit=bounds\")
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