Snakes on Film

The opening titles of I, Claudius are famous enough that Sesame Street parodied them in one of the first iterations of “Monsterpiece Theater.” They feature a snake crawling across a Roman mosaic; the snake is, appropriately enough, an Adder (Vipera berus), a venomous snake native to Europe, and one of only three snakes found in Britain. (It’s not terribly dangerous compared to other venomous snakes, but you still don’t want to be bitten by one. Or eat the figs.)

Last night’s episode (June 17, 2009) featured a challenge where the two competitors, Lou Diamond Phillips and Torrie Wilson, had to collect tokens from a tank of 35 snakes (some of which escaped during the course of the program). Apart from an easily identifiable Boa Constrictor, the snakes appear to be harmless colubrid species local to Costa Rica; I can’t identify any of them, but they have look of harmless tropical snakes (deadly tropical snakes are much more famous), Except for one larger snake that took a few swings, the snakes were reasonably tractable; the competitors took them in stride with hardly any ewing. But why the hell were they wearing helmets?

The episode can be viewed here (watch out for popups); the snake competition begins about 12 minutes in. A preview is also on YouTube.

Killers Mickey and Mallory stumble across a den of rattlesnakes and are bitten. The photography is fast and furious in this scene, but it’s possible to make out that most of the snakes in the medium shots are Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox), which is an appropriate choice. In the grainy, blurry, black-and-white closeups of snakes striking, I think they substituted in a harmless Bullsnake or Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer); they have similar coloration.

Then they’re off to a drug store to get some rattlesnake antivenin — or, as they call it, “snake-bite juice.” It’s sold out on the shelves, so Mickey goes for the pharmacist, who manages to blurt out, “Don’t carry it. Hospital,” before he gets shot. Here’s the thing: antivenin isn’t stocked by pharmacies, and it would never have been available on the shelves. It’s always administered in hospitals: bite victims would have to be monitored for an allergic reaction to the antivenin, which might be deadlier, in some cases, than the snakebite itself.

The Sci-Fi channel has a lot to answer for. Much could be said about the risible awfulness of this piece of cable-TV dreck — much, in fact, has been said. It seems a bit unnecessary to nitpick the errors in biology in a movie where a giant python orally pleasures a woman with his tongue (!!!), where the logical response to a giant python loose in a major city’s water supply is to release an equally large boa — and where the giant boa and giant python are almost never seen in the same frame until the last few minutes!

Nevertheless, nitpicking is our business, and I have taken copious notes. Onward!

1. The giant snakes sound like slavering beasts: they growl, snarl and carry on like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian devil. A young boa constrictor chirps. You do know snakes are deaf, right?
2. Giant snakes are apparently impervious to gunfire, flame throwers, and ordnance capable of levelling small villages in Bulgaria (which is where this atrocity was filmed). That crossbow will totally work, though.
3. The FBI agent finds a giant individual scale. Snakes don’t have individual scales like fish; they’re an unbroken part of the skin.
4. Snakes don’t have prehensile tails and don’t use them as weapons, the way, say, iguanas and monitor lizards do.
5. Betty is a “scarlet queen boa,” which of course does not exist.
6. “Most snakes are territorial, especially the big constrictors.” No; very few snakes are territorial.
7. No snake has a heart rate approaching 300 bpm.
8. Snakes swallow their food whole; they don’t bite, chew or otherwise rip it apart.
9. They handled the whole inter-species mating and immediate egg-laying thing reasonably enough, but snake eggshells are leathery, not brittle.
10. Glowing eyes?
11. Um, guys, pythons can swim. You won’t get away that way.

In a word, yuck. Thank God for the wholly gratuitous nudity 10 minutes in.

The Madagascar portion of Casino Royale opens with a crowd betting on a staged cobra-vs.-mongoose fight. Trouble is, there are no cobras in Madagascar — and such staged fights are more an Indian thing, anyway. The snake itself is hard for me to identify, since I’m not a cobra specialist, but my best guess is that it’s an Indian Cobra (Naja naja). In any event, nice to see the snake win, for a change.

Mr. Bond falls into a pool containing a huge, Bond-eating python, but he defies Drax’s latest attempt to plan an amusing death for him by stabbing the python in the throat with a pen. “You’re not a sportsman, Mr. Bond,” says the quotable Drax. “Why did you break off the encounter with my pet python?” Bond’s inevitably cringeworthy riposte: “I discovered he had a crush on me.” Groan.

Now, the snake in question is almost certainly not real — even in the opening frames, where it’s flicking its tongue most realistically, I think it’s a fake. The pattern most closely resembles a Reticulated Python — in this case, a morbidly obese one. But Reticulated Pythons come from southeast Asia; Drax’s lair is in the Amazon. Could there possibly have been a large, aquatic snake indigenous to the Amazon that would have been capable of snuffing the life out of gonorrheic British secret agents? I know there is one; the name’s on the tip of my tongue …

“Rat snakes aren’t that big,” says Indy, as they try to pull him out of the sand pit with one. You said it, Indy; not only that, but I’m not sure anything called a rat snake comes in that size and colour in South America. I’m actually having trouble identifying the species used in this scene; I’m not even sure if it’s a large colubrid or a slender Australian python. Either way, using a large snake as a rope would simply disarticulate every vertebra in its spinal column. This will not save you, Dr. Jones. Then again, in a movie with nuked fridges and easily coopted spider monkeys, this is not the most impossible thing we were asked to believe. Now, as for calling the snake slimy … well, we need to have a sit-down about that.

A cute commercial from Mars promoting the M&Ms-Indiana Jones tie-in, featuring the animated M&Ms reprising the famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The commercial can be viewed online here. It’s a good thing snakes are indifferent to chocolate.

(P.S. That looks like a corn snake at the end of the ad.)

Albert’s helpful pet viper, Adolphe, saves the day in this comedy set on Devil’s Island, but he does all of his dirty work — extinguishing the lives of the two villains — off-screen. In fact, we never actually see Adolphe: all his screen time is spent inside his cage, which makes identifying him a moot point. He’s described as “a little snake, about this big,” and “all different colours like a pretty bracelet,” which sounds more like a coral snake than a viper, insofar as French Guyanese snakes are concerned, but there it is. But a snake with a taste for music? “Vipers are very musical reptiles; they’re much more musical than people think,” says Jules (played by Peter Ustinov). I suppose: snakes are as deaf as Beethoven.

I know I’m pushing my luck with a second porn entry, but this (edited clip) from the seventies porn film, The Devil in Miss Jones, plays on the usual Judeo-Christian temptation metaphors — this scene apparently takes place in Hell — as well as the also-usual, but more crass, phallic snake imagery that we got a taste of in our previous entry. Lord knows what the young boa constrictor is thinking during this ordeal.