"Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid" is made by much of the same team behind 1997's hit camp horror flick "Anaconda", although this isn't a direct sequel as such (different location, entirely different characters). In "Anacondas", scientists set off on an expedition to the Borneo jungle to track down a rare flower called the blood orchid to find out if the flower holds the secret to youth and immortality. But the group finds anacondas who are already aware of the orchid's gifts. These giant snakes have derived super strength, speed and size from the flowers and the scientists soon find themselves running for their lives.

Unlike the expensive budgets of AVP or the "Exorcist" prequel, "Anacondas" - a movie with no real stars and in one of the quietest periods of the year is expected to make a very nice chunk of profit for the studio and hopefully go onto the level of name recognition its 1997 progenitor did - a film which was a financial hit ($35M budget, $132M worldwide gross) that helped launch the careers of the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Owen Wilson.

When production was underway at the end of last year, hardly any journalists were allowed onto the set in Fiji, certainly no other online outlets. Being only four hours plane flight away in Sydney, I was invited over for a few days to the island to look around the sets and chat with the assorted cast and crew. Now, on the eve of the film's release, at last I can bring you my full report.

Later this week I'll be running interviews I conducted with the key cast and the film's director Dwight Little about their filming in the real life jungles that dominate Pacific Harbour, one of the more remote and poorer areas of Fiji. This wasn't some cushy studio complex in a major city, this was nearly two hours drive from the nearest town of Suva in a very green rural area that was regularly deluged by tropical rainstorms.

Everything here was done on location, some scenes requiring shooting in water tanks and constructed sets that existed not in some concrete warehouse but rather under a giant collapsible tent. Even some of the simplest pieces of equipment (eg. desks & computers) had to be brought in from Australia & New Zealand to accomodate the large scale production which was, make no mistake, just as big if not more so than many films of this genre.

Back in the late 90's after the first movie fared so well financially, especially in the overseas markets, the foreign sales division of Sony Pictures was very keen on getting the studio to green light a sequel right away. The producers continued to develop various ideas for the sequel but it looked like it would never happen due to internal disagreements over the direction it should take. Then after a few years, the now retired Chairman John Kelly asked if they could make it for a price with their Screen Gems division - combine that with the tax break incentives in Fiji and bang, the project finally came together.

The film is bigger than the first in terms of scale, locations, computer effects, etc., even though it actually cost less to make. There's more of a psychological horror aspect this time and while there's plenty of CG snakes, they restrain that element to try and make the scares better. The tone is also a lot less campy and far darker than the first film even though there's humour from the characters throughout the movie.

The cast is made up of essentially unknowns and in the end they went with the people they thought worked best with the characters rather than selecting big stars or utilising a Spanish/Latino female lead as some studio execs were pushing for. Story wise things got changed a bit from the original script, but all seem to be much happier with the final shooting script which has a lot more action than the initial drafts.

In this film there's many snakes as it's mating season and a female is in heat, so all these male snakes are rushing towards one area - the same place the expedition is heading for of course. The snakes are around two feet across and 35-40 feet in length. The snakes look distinctly different from the first film's snake with much more skin patterning, yellow and green tones and more angular and realistic facial features (and this time they have sharp teeth).

Aside from the tax breaks, Fiji was selected because it was pro-American, safe, had spectacular locations which haven't been used before (the last film shot in Pacific Harbour was in the 1940's), and the local people proved to be hard workers. Despite all the importing of equipment and remoteness of locations, everything was on time and budget. The jungles of Fiji are rather thick and dark which made lighting and shooting difficult to setup but gave freedom in other ways that working on a soundstage did not.

Early on it was decided most of the snakes would be CGI because the technology is far more developed than it was seven years ago when they made the first film. There's still quite a few animatronic elements though, mostly giant robotic snake heads. The snakes themselves are simpler than you'd think in terms of complex internal mechanics which allows the snake parts to be capable of a rather wide range of movements (certainly more than the first film's snake).

Photon FX is handling the CG, and Studio Kite in Sydney produced all the on-set creature effects which included a full animatronic cable-controlled head, a 'decapa-conda' head capable of detaching from its neck, many different sections of 'snake body' (about 100ft in all) for sliding through water, wrapping around cast appendages and one bit nicknamed the 'mating ball' sequence. A 'Blue Kabuki' snake was made for CGI reference shots, and an animatronic 'Queen Mouth & Head' rig was developed for the ending involving the female snake which is bigger and more orange in colour.

Snakes aren't the only critters you'll see in this - Crocodiles, monkeys, a tiger and a spider appear, as does a water buffalo which gets eaten and regurgitated - all (bar the tiger which was real) were constructed for the film by the FX people. The crocs were built on a huge hydraulic rig for a fight scene with one of the cast and a 'death roll' scene. They had difficulties with operating these complex robotic creations in the remote humid area which was regularly drenched in rain - pre-production in fact saw a whole month of uninterrupted showers at one point.

Throughout the few days there I got to see several big set pieces. On the first day a scene in the jungle involved much of the cast being startled by a giant snake emerging from a hole right in front of them. Luckily Sam (Kadee Strickland) is wielding a rather huge machete and uses it in time to save them. The crew were having a ball with the giant robot snake head of course which was capable of a variety of subtle and large movements.

A trip down to the 'Studio Tent' revealed another sequence involving a cave. The character's are chased by one of the anacondas blindly in the night time and lose their footing, sliding down into this cave - the snake follows them into this unerground labyrinth and they find themselves trying to get out. There's also a subterranian chamber extension to this scene which was being shot at the Suva Olympic diving pool.

On the other side of the tent was the leftovers of one of the film's more elaborate scenes - the 'sinkhole' sequence where a large cluster of the flowers are located. A fallen tree trunk is the bridge over a rather high crevasse. Various different versions of this set had to be built in different locales for different reasons (wide shots, close-up acting bits, etc.). The Blood Orchid flowers in these scenes underwent assorted designs but ended up most resembling a Borneo native flower called the Bat Orchid. Around 300 in total were made for the production.

Nearby was the water tank to shoot the boat called 'The Bloody Mary' which gets turned upside down after being thrown over a waterfall. The whole upside-down, tipped, underwater boat sequence was the biggest challenge for the film's production designers. The boat itself was built in a shed using the base of a Chinese Junk, and said building was demolished in order to get it out and tractor it to the locations required.

The biggest scene I was witness to though was on the final night in a giant jungle hut. It was there they filmed a large sequence involving the snakes making their way into the hut and of course, a large explosion. The Lopec Village scene (the characters stumble across a native Borneo village in the jungle) was one of the favourites of the cast to shoot - the set involved a lot of intricate details involving wood carving and basket weaving.

All up despite the challenging conditions the production seemed to be moving very smoothly. The film's trailer has proven a big hit in terms of audience reaction and there seems to be a quickly growing buzz for it. Here's hoping this sequel will become as big a hit (and will be as entertaining) as the first.