Giant Snake Creature Feature Beware Boiúna (FANTASTIC) Delivers on Reptilian Terror

Title: Beware Boiúna

First Non-Festival Release: October 2, 2026 (Theatrical Release)

Director: Mike P. Nelson

Writer: Tony Giglio, Alan B. McElroy, Mike P. Nelson

Runtime: 104 Minutes

Starring: Jessica Rothe, Kiana Madeira, Logan Marshall-Green

Where to Watch: Check out where to find it here

This film’s review was written after its screening at the Fantastic Film Festival in 2026.

The Amazon Rainforest is great for many reasons. It is home to millions of people, features exceptional biodiversity, and provides vital resources for the sustainability of humanity. It’s beautiful and important but also deadly. Beyond the harsh terrain and lethal species that reside in the rainforest, the biggest threats in the Amazon tend to be human in nature.

This rings true for a small medical team seeking to provide basic healthcare to the hard-to-reach towns, villages, and tribes in the Amazon Rainforest. Alli (Jessica Rothe) is among the doctors. Eager to make a difference but clearly out of her element, she goes about the work with quiet dedication and eagerness to learn. On one of their stops, Alli accidentally makes an enemy in Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green), a surveyor working for a company with dubious intentions. She and crew member Lena (Kiana Madeira) accidentally kill his brother after he attempts to rape Alli. Putting as much distance between themselves and Brennan’s team, the medical mission trip gets cut short when they cross paths with the legendary Boiúna, a giant, mythological snake creature that lives in the Amazon Rainforest.

Beware Boiúna is a fun action horror creature feature that delivers on its terrifying premise.

Titanoboa horror films are already limited in supply, let alone good ones. Beware Boiúna is the first to truly work, even if it isn’t perfect. Its sweaty, grounded take on the region demonstrates just how slippery, challenging, and scary the jungle can be while still ensuring plenty of snake mayhem ensues. Building on the bones left behind from the 90s creature feature, Anaconda, Beware Boiúna slithers its way into the same setting with much more intentionality.

And that’s what Beware Boiúna accomplishes by critiquing the ways in which colonization harms beautiful places like the Amazon. There’s a lingering undercurrent of the political situation deep in the rainforest within Beware Boiúna. Between threats of loggers, miners, surveyors, and more, it’s no wonder that the medical team is looked at with distrust. Hordes of white men with money have used the Amazon, and other places like it, as their own personal resource extraction playground, unconcerned with the ramifications of their actions on the local population or wildlife.

Twisting the original purpose of the legend, Beware Boiúna depicts the spirit as vengeful, particularly at those that upset the balance in the forest. It’s a nice reframe only for the sake of reiterating the importance of the Amazon to Indigenous folks as well as their relationship with it. While a few do become targets of the fearsome snake, it really only happens when they meddle.

While there is plenty to enjoy here, Beware Boiúna is not without its problems. Despite boasting impressive snake effects, it’s difficult to applaud sometimes given how chaotic and dark the camerawork gets. The shaky cam adds to the frantic feeling one would have in the situation but makes it much more difficult to follow along. The repetitive action sequences and cheesy, expository dialogue take away from the overall menace of the snake too.

It’s hampered by the underwritten human antagonist, Brennan, and his henchmen. Their presence in the film doesn’t add much to what is already slithering beneath the surface. The cold open sets the scene with plenty of background information to understand where the film is going. The thoughtless, comically evil introduction to the men only gives it a Syfy original film feel to it. It doesn’t help that the protagonists are also light on character development too, relying on the snake carnage to do the heavy lifting for the film. Thankfully, Beware Boiúna does play around with Brennan’s character at the end, but the pivot is unfortunately too little, too late.

Despite all this, Beware Boiúna manages to be both fun and scary in its attempts at reviving a pretty dead sub-genre of creature features. There’s a nice subversion to the final girl trope that feels welcome, and necessary given the film’s themes, and Jessica Rothe and Kiana Madeira give great performances. It features some seriously squirmy set pieces, the quicksand and tractor scenes particularly, and does what it can with the environment given. It’s interesting in how it ignores the typical rise-and-fall scare dynamics one would expect a film like it to employ but it works in the end. Instead, Beware Boiúna raises the stakes in a more chaotic and unexpected way.

Not all will enjoy Beware Boiúna but those susceptible to its reptilian charm will delight in some of the best creature effects that this particular type of beast has yet to see committed to screen. Strong performances from the leads and a beautiful, captivating setting do heavy lifting for the middling script and obnoxious camerawork. Strong scares seal the deal, making Beware Boiúna a must-watch for fans of creature features. If this sounds up your alley, don’t forget to shed your skin of any preconceived notions and give Beware Boiúna the attention she deserves.

Overall Score? 7/10