Beware Boiúna: Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe & Mike P. Nelson (& Creature Features)

Kyle McMahon (0:00)

In this episode of Pop Culture Weekly, we're diving into creature features, killer snakes, Amazon horror, and talking with the cast and creative team behind Beware Boiúna. Let's go.

SPEAKER_2 (0:13)

Welcome to Pop Culture Weekly with Kyle McMahon, your pop culture news, views, reviews, and celebrity interviews on all the movies, TV, music, and pop culture you crave weekly. Here's Kyle McMahon.

Kyle McMahon (0:32)

What's up, Degenerates? Welcome to Pop Culture Weekly, the show where we take pop culture very seriously, even when the pop culture in question is a gigantic Amazonian snake trying to eat everyone. I, of course, am Kyle McMahon, and today we are talking about one of my favorite corners of horror, creature features. Give me King Kong, give me Jaws, give me Lake Placid, give me a gigantic animal that has decided humanity has had a pretty good run, and it's officially time to wrap that shit up. I am there.

When I was a kid, one movie in particular had me completely obsessed with creature features, and that is Anaconda, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, John Voight, making some truly incredible acting decisions. A documentary crew floating through the Amazon while a gigantic snake picks them off. I freaking loved that movie. I still do, to be honest. But the creature features that really work, they understand something important. The creature itself can't carry the entire movie. You have to care about the people that it's chasing. Otherwise, I'm just watching some creature's expensive lunch.

And that is what immediately grabbed me about the new film Beware Boiúna. It is a new R-rated creature feature from director Mike P. Nelson. It stars Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe and Logan Marshall Greene. And yes, there is an enormous snake in it, a very, very enormous snake. But the film actually gives a crap about its characters. It really does. So before we get into my conversations with Kiana, Jessica and Mike, I need to talk about the snake because I went into this movie knowing absolutely nothing about Boiúna. Turns out they did not just invent a giant murder snake and give her a cool name. Boiúna, also known as Cobra Grande or the Great Snake, it actually comes from Amazonian folklore in Brazil. There are different versions of the legend, but Brazil's National Center for Folklore and Popular Culture describes the Cobra Grande as a mythical being of the Amazon that lives in the deepest parts of the river. Its eyes are said to shine like torches, frightening fishermen, and the grooves left behind it as it moves across the land becomes streams, which is already enough for me. If I'm on a river at night, anyway, what the F? If I'm on a river at night and two gigantic glowing eyes suddenly appear in the water, I don't need additional lore and backstory. I've received the message, I am leaving. And learning that after seeing Beware Boiúna made the creature even cooler to me because the movie is taking something that already has a life in Amazonian folklore and it's turning it into the foundation for this big R-rated creature feature. And Hollywood does have a bit of history with giant snakes.

Obviously, there's Anaconda. And Anaconda understood something that Beware Boiúna understands too. If you're going to put a gigantic snake in a movie, putting it in the Amazon is a pretty damn good idea. You can't see very far in front of you, right? Everything is alive. Everything's making noise. The weather hates you. The terrain hates you. Your phone is basically an expensive camera with no service. And then something moves in the water.

And what's cool, Beware Boiúna really was shot in the Colombian Amazon. I had a suspicion watching it because this did not look like, you know, West Dublin-Sin County Park, Indiana. That's standing in for the Amazon. There's really a tactile kind of quality to the whole thing. And that extends to Boiúna herself. The movie combines visual effects with practical techniques. You know, I love my practical effects. And they used both of them during production to give actors something physical to respond to and help sell the idea that something absolutely enormous is moving through this environment. And you know me, practical effects are catnip for me. But at the end of the day, none of that matters if I don't give a damn about the characters. Which brings me to Kiana Madeira and Jessica Rothe. Kiana plays Lena while Jessica plays Allie, a doctor who arrives here believing that she can help. And if you're a horror fan, these two already have some pretty serious genre credentials. Kiana starred in Netflix's Fear Street Trilogy, which is amazing. And Jessica survived being murdered over and over and over again in Happy Death Day.