Review: Man V. Monster: Amazon River Beast

Richard holding the green anaconda.
Image credit National Geographic.

In the fifth episode of Man V. Monster, Richard Terry travels to the Amazon Rainforest in search of a creature responsible for a series of violent attacks. This is the second episode dealing with the Amazon: the first covered giant spiders, and the already-reviewed Mapinguary episode was the third and final. Like with that review, this is constructed entirely from memory.

Richard starts out going along the Amazon River by water taxi, but he ends up having to go alone to his target village in a smalle canoe. Come nightfall, he's still on the river, stuck in reeds. However, he manages to find the fishing village eventually, and interviews a victim of the animal he is searching for.

Notably, this episode is not actually cryptozoological: Richard tries to find the (known) animal behind the attacks, not a new species. The locals don't even have a name for the animal beyond "grande" - "big".

When morning comes, Richard searches a nearby tributary with a large net. He eventually finds an arapaima (which is released from the net eventually). Whilst it is big and aggressive, its mouth is not big enough to inflict the wounds he saw on the victims leg.

Richard stays in the forest alone as night falls, with his guide Samwell within radio distance. He finds a black caiman, and considers a large variant of crocodile a possible culprit behind the attacks. He continues to move through the forest in the day, trying to get to a village on the other side of a swamp. Night falls, and he is forced to stay in an abandoned, derelict but frankly still very nice-looking old house on the riverbank.

Richard's house for the night.
Image credit National Geographic.

When he reaches the village, which is heavily flooded, a local tells him about an encounter with the animal. He got a clearer look than other victims, and Richard deduces that the animal was an anaconda. In light of this, he travels miles south to try and find a wild anaconda with the help of a German expert. They fail, as the boat capsizes and a storm rolls in.

Richard and Samwell eventually find a small green anaconda in the forest, and take it out of its den to be examined. As they let it go, Richard concludes that a large anaconda is almost certainly the culprit behind the attacks. And, considering the rate at which new species are discovered in the Amazon, he says has no doubt that there could be a giant species of anaconda somewhere in the rainforest.