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The Hoff vs. The Snakes. Who wins? Certainly not us.

Let’s see now: Anaconda 3: Offspring is a movie about aggressive, over-sized animals attacking humanity. It’s a direct-to-video DVD release starring a has-been former star (well, okay, David Hasselhoff, but close enough)...how is this NOT part of that Maneater Series from Genius that I end up reviewing the newest installment of every month?

No, instead we get the third in a series absolutely no one was begging for. Sure, the original was fun, what with a pre-stardom Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube doing his thing and Eric Stoltz literally sleeping his way through top billing and a paycheck. But that should have been it. Unfortunately, we got saddled with one previous sequel (which I have yet to bother with) and now this (and head’s up folks: Before the movie starts, one of the trailers is for PART FOUR.

The story is pretty routine: Two genetically-engineered megasnakes get loose and start heading for civilization. One of them is female and – you guessed it – knocked up. It’s up to the Hoff (as Hammett, a mercenary who apparently can’t find better work than hunting snakes) to track the serpents down and off them before they drop the litter.

Now, to its benefit, the film does have a slightly higher sense of production value than many of the animal-attack films I’ve watched lately. That said, it’s still the epitome of a B-film. The snakes are still laughably fake in their CGI-created glory and Hoff doesn’t so much seem like himself but rather comes across like Will Ferrell doing a Hasselhoff imitation. There’s also a plot twist near the end that, while it was telegraphed a bit, really took me by surprise.

Par for the course, there are no special features on this Sony-released DVD outside of some trailers for other movies.

Anaconda 3 is just good enough to not be completely irredeemable, but enough already. Let’s move on to some other pissed-off creatures running amok, like koalas or chipmunks or something.

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