Snakes on Film

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.

Pornographic movies play with Freudian snake symbolism, but do so so badly. Take, for example, this clip that has been making the rounds of the Internets; it’s from a 1997 porn flick called (sigh) Pussy Beat 2. “You gotta really watch out for the garter snakes,” says the diminutive English teacher (garter snakes?!), but the giant snake that descends upon him and his Hungarian exchange student (sigh) could have come straight from the IKEA catalogue. Laugh as he rolls around battling the obviously fake snake! Wince as he utters the cheese-o-rama line that segues from this lame introduction to — well, this clip is on YouTube, so it fades to black at this point. You know what happens next.

People have animal familiars in the world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, so it’s no surprise that some people have snakes. Presumably, only the evil people do, because that’s the bad rap snakes get. In one scene we see a computer-generated cobra; in another, a member of the Magisterium holds his familiar during their meetings. As we can see from this still from the movie trailer, it’s clearly a Corn Snake (Elaphe guttata), and a damn pretty one besides. If the animal familiar reflects the person’s personality, then this individual must be very much like a Corn Snake: laid-back, a prodigious fornicator, and someone prone to fouling his dwelling after someone has just cleaned it. (Time to clean the Corn Snake cages again.)

Canadian brewery Steelback markets a beer called “Copperhead” in the Bohemian pilsener style, though Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) are native neither to Bohemia nor to small Canadian breweries. They did manage to get a real, live Copperhead to appear in their ad for the beer (QuickTime, 2.5 MB), which is something. Do pit vipers work for scale?

The Adam-and-Eve plot twist was already old hat when Women of the Prehistoric Planet was released in 1966, a movie strangely uncontaminated by prehistoric women. In a scene that in no way has anything to do with foreshadowing, one of the expendable crewmen says, after an encounter with a giant stock-footage iguana that they lasered into burning papier-mache, “If that’s the way they grow lizards around here, I’d hate to run into a snake.” And wouldn’t you know it, a snake shows up mere minutes later — after all, you can’t have a transparently bad science-fiction take on Adam and Eve without a snake, can you? Even if it’s a big, menacing snake … well okay, it’s a half-grown Boa Constrictor that, once shot by a pocket crossbow, magically morphs into a rubber snake that looks nothing like it. Still: eek. Amirite?

Best viewed in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version: can’t be too careful.

I have had it with these motherf***ing snakes on this motherf***ing train! Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr., Age 13

Young Indy is a little old to be developing a phobia, and it’s a little precious to suggest that his adult character traits were formed in an eight-minute span, but there it is. While trying to escape from the bad guys in Utah, Indy jumps on a circus train and runs into trouble in the reptile car when the catwalk gives way. First he somersaults into a tank containing an animatronic anaconda — say that ten times — then falls backwards into a crate filled with small snakes. Those snakes — like the one we saw earlier when Indy tells his scouting friend “It’s only a snake” — are Red-sided Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis).

Ahem. I know something about Red-sided Garter Snakes: not only have I been to the dens, I’ve also bred and raised that particular subspecies. Spielberg and company used thousands of them, imported from Manitoba, which at that time still allowed commercial collecting. (A year or two later, after an average of 52,000 snakes per year were harvested from the province, collecting was stopped over concerns that the population was being fished out.)

Interestingly, the snake that crawls from Indy’s wrist onto one of the bad guys a minute or two later isn’t a red-sided garter; my partner Jennifer, who tried to ascertain the sex of the snakes while watching this movie, immediately identified it as a Wandering Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans vagrans). We’ve got one of those too, and even had a litter a few years back.

So, garter snakes made Indiana Jones an ophidiophobe. What a pussy.

Only one brief scene with a live snake in the second Indiana Jones movie (ignoring the dinner scene’s “Snake Surprise,” which was filled, like a hovercraft, with eels). About 33 minutes in, Willie Scott tosses away a snake dangling over her shoulder, thinking it’s an elephant’s trunk, while Indy recoils in fear. The appropriate snake for this purpose would be an Indian Python (Python molurus molurus) or light-phase Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus), and by God that’s just what they used. (Even so, they had to fly a pair of snakes into Sri Lanka, where the film was being shot; seats were reserved for Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow.) Another snake scene was planned, but cancelled before it was shot, to the considerable relief of the ophidiophobic Kate Capshaw.

Now, if this blog was called Crocs on Film, I might point out that using American Alligators in the suspension bridge scene instead of an indigenously Indian crocodilian species kind of ruins the verisimilitude, but it isn’t, so I won’t.

Our favourite ophidiophobe encounters snakes twice in the first of the three Indiana Jones movies. First, in South America, he finds himself in Jock’s plane, sharing a seat with Jock’s pet snake. You’d think that, being in South America, they’d use something South American, like a Boa Constrictor, which isn’t exactly hard to find. But no: they used a Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus) instead.

Then, of course, the scene: the Well of the Souls, full of snakes. As Spielberg recounts on the bonus disc, they started with a few thousand harmless snakes, then had to add more. Trouble is, most of what they added were glass snakes — which is to say, Glass Lizards (Ophiosaurus), legless lizards that are definitely lizards, with eyelids, ears, lizard scales and breakable tails (hence the name). I spotted an awful lot of them in the scene’s wide-angle shots; as for the smaller nonvenomous snakes, I couldn’t make them out, though I think I spotted at least one garter snake (my favourite snakes, so of course I would).

There were pythons, which were easier to spot: the striking snakes were small Reticulated Pythons (Python reticulatus) from southeast Asia, not the sort of thing you’d find in Egypt; there were some larger-bodied pythons, but I couldn’t tell whether they were African sebae or Asian molurus — it doesn’t matter, since neither are found in Egypt. And look: here are the Boa Constrictors they could have used at the start of the movie!

The cobra scene was well done: actors behind clear plastic for safety, of course. But the cobra was a Monocled Cobra (Naja kaouthia), rather than an Egyptian Cobra (Naja haje). Egyptian Cobras are psycho; Monocled Cobras are more common in captivity and have more distinctive markings.

But no asps (very dangerous), so far as I could tell.