Beware Boiúna Review: Snake With No Bite and No Brain

Mike P. Nelson hasn’t only directed soft reboots of established horror franchises, but it’s definitely become his stock-in-trade. First there was his abysmal relaunch of the redneck cannibal Wrong Turn franchise as some kind of half-witted conspiracy flick. He followed this up with his re-envisioning of Silent Night, Deadly Night, which welded together the Christmas slasher with the dark passenger plot from Dexter to at least somewhat interesting results. Now he’s the latest in a long chain of studio placeholders charged with resurrecting the Saw franchise, a thankless task if ever there was one.

But before then he’s inflicted Beware Boiúna on us, a low-budget Anaconda riff so derivative and ramshackle that its antagonist should grow legs just so it could slink away in shame faster. Actually, it wishes it was an Anaconda movie, but even then it would be the worst in the franchise, an even more depressing attempt to ring blood from a stone than 2025’s hapless meta-reboot. Beware Boiúna is more like an early-2000s Sci-Fi Channel assembly-line mockbuster.

Nelson attempts to give the “white folks in the jungle meet a big snake” plot a more contemporary and progressive veneer by replacing the ragtag crew of the Benedictita with the ragtag crew of the Hermes. Juan Pablo Shuk plays Miguel, a doctor leading a pair of hapless medics into the jungle to help indigenous tribes. There’s nerdy Callum (Will Close), whose job is to whine occasionally, and gutsy Alli (Jessica Rothe, Happy Death Day), who, for a trainee healthcare worker, has an amazing ability to get people killed. After accidentally dispatching of two people, she and the team find themselves pursued up river by Evil Corporate Guy Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green, Upgrade, The Invitation), with only wise boat captain Raúl (Jaime Newball) and hard-headed mechanic Lena (Kiana Madeira, Fear Street) to keep them safe and away from la Boiúna, a giant and potentially mythical guardian of the jungle.

If Nelson had an original idea when he wrote the script, it must have drowned in the muddy waters of the Amazon. Paying tribute to your influences, such as photocopying the synopsis of Anaconda, is one thing, but blatantly ripping off Predator and Aliens in consecutive action sequences is another.

One particular trick of Anaconda that Nelson purloins is an attempted misdirection. In the 1997 fan fave, it was a shock when the only real above-the-title talent, Eric Stoltz, was taken out early. Here, Nelson leaves the camera on Alli but it’s clearly Lena that’s getting the character development and the plot, even though it’s such a one-note performance from Madeira for most of the film. As for the villain, Marshall-Green is the stand-in for Jon Voight’s leering snake hunter, but he’s also by far the most sympathetic and logically-written character around. Every time Nelson thinks he’s getting something over on the audience, he just faceplants.

That could be overlooked if Beware Boiúna was a halfway decent creature feature, but it’s not. Subpar CG is hidden behind so much foliage that the rare moments in which la Boiúna is visible are embarrassing, and the rest of the time the audience is squinting to work out what’s going on. Worse, Nelson never seems sure where the big snake is just a big snake, or a malevolent force of nature, or that demigod Mother of the Waters. Ascribing motivations to a giant CG reptile in a brainless monster movie may seem like a fool’s errand, but then Nelson seems to be trying for something a little deeper. Unfortunately, he fails, and that makes his attempts to give a more nuanced depiction of the peoples of the Amazonian forests even more depressing. They’re given a little more humanity than the Ya̧nomamö in Cannibal Holocaust, but not much.

Beware Boiúna? Beware the whole film.

Beware Boiúna

2026, R, 104 min. Directed by Mike P. Nelson. Starring Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe, Logan Marshall-Green, Will Close, Juan Pablo Shuk, Jaime Newball.

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

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