A low-budget direct-to-DVD mockbuster released to cash in on the hype surrounding Snakes on a Plane, this movie actually came out three days before Snakes on a Plane was released. It’s quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen more than one Ed Wood movie, so that’s saying something). Not only is it tedious and boring, its dialogue painful and its characters disposable, the nudity takes a full hour to make an appearance, which in this genre is inexcusable.

Here’s the premise: a cursed woman hides aboard a train in an attempt to get to Los Angeles to have the curse lifted; the curse makes her literally vomit deadly snakes. And if that already puts strain on your willingness to suspend disbelief, wait for it. No deadly snakes actually make an appearance in this movie. Up until the last 10 minutes or so, when Burmese Pythons and Boa Constrictors make an appearance shortly before the final bad-CGI giant snake swallows the whole train — spoilers, because I don’t actually want you to see the film — the snakes we’re expected to believe are deadly are played by Common Garter Snakes (including some juveniles) and Ball Pythons. Which, of course, being garter snakes and pythons, don’t do very much on-screen. Not only that, in some scenes, an actual plastic snake toy is included among the garter snakes!

It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s hardly worth mentioning that snakes don’t eat bread, or that putting a garter snake in your mouth isn’t a very idea (their musk is pretty rank). Because the basic problem of the movie is that it takes until the very end for everyone to figure out how to deal with snakes on a train: 1. Stop the train. 2. Get off the train. Problem solved!

This Travelers Insurance commercial has a laugh at a rattlesnake’s expense, substituting a baby’s rattle for the real thing to illustrate what happens when you don’t use the right replacement parts when getting your car repaired after an accident.

Allow me to nitpick: rattlesnakes use their rattles when threatened, to warn predators and large lumbering beasts off, not when they’re hunting for food. Rattlers are ambush predators; they’re certainly not going to tip off their meal that they’re about to attack — not when their meal can outrun them. When wattlesnakes hunt wabbits, they’re vewy, vewy quiet.

The more of them I watch, the better a handle I get on the snakesploitation movie genre — the sort that advertises the snake in the movie as “__ feet of pure terror.” Python epitomizes the genre as well as any other I’ve seen (here the terror is 60 feet long on the DVD case, 129 feet in the movie itself). It contains the usual tropes you find in modern examples of snakesploitation: gratuitous nudity, gore, bad CGI, and ludicrous snake biology that is explained away by mad hand-waving (experiments or genetic engineering that make a fairly innocuous and unaggressive animal into the relentless killing machine required by the movie’s, um, “plot”).

My mandate is to go after the biology, but the more I watch this kind of movie, the more I consider it a lost cause. Because, again, these movies give themselves an out: it’s precisely because this snake breaks all the rules of snake biology that it poses a threat to our heroes and their shitty little town. And the reason the rules are broken is to solve plot problems. Need something to happen? No problem! Have the snake do this! So, in this case, we have a snake that

1. spits stomach acid on its victims rather than eating them, because, as the director points out, it’s way cooler and gorier than an unidentifiable lump of snake poo a week or two later;
2. can decapitate anti-vaccine-crusading-but-surprisingly-not-naked-in-this-movie Playmates with a flick of its tail;
3. despite the fact that snakes use their tongues to smell (in stereo!) and many snakes, including many pythons, have heat pits, cannot see someone standing right in front of them unless they move;
4. can hear;
5. despite the fact that snakes have clear scales over their eyes, has sensitive eyes that would have been affected by shampoo if it wasn’t a no-tears product; and
6. is impervious to explosions, gunfire and blunt force trauma.

Meanwhile, two real pythons make an appearance in the movie: a young Burmese Python is taken camping by one of the early victims — somebody please explain to our soon-to-be-dead girl that, yes, you can leave a snake alone for a weekend — and a baby Ball Python, carried about by Robert Englund’s creepy doctor like worry beads.

“This isn’t terrorism; these are snakes!” — Tara Reid, Captain Obvious.

Another truly bad entry in the snakesploitation movie sweepstakes, Viper is a movie that combines poor computer-generated effects with lame acting and frankly ludicrous biology, one whose brief nudity is insufficient to save it. As usual, snakes have to be genetically enhanced to pose any threat; even incredibly deadly snakes, after all, shy away from a direct confrontation if they can.

Amongst the errors are such diverse elements as the following:

1. Horned Vipers (Cerastes cerastes) do not look like that: for one thing, they’re a lot smaller than that (they’re about two feet long); for another, they’re a lot paler in colour; for still another, their horns aren’t right.
2. The snake in Jessica Steen’s slideshow isn’t a horned viper; it looks like a young cottonmouth or some South American lancehead-or-other.
3. As I said in my look at Boa vs. Python, snakes don’t bite and chew like that; they swallow things whole or not at all. They certainly don’t rip big meaty chunks out of their prey like an allosaur. The chomping and feeding — and spurting blood — is utterly stupid.
4. The movie makes a certain deal out of heat and cold and the fact that snakes are ectotherms; it’s worth mentioning, though, that Horned Vipers, which are found in the desert climates in North Africa and the Middle East, would have a real problem with the Pacific Northwest climate: too cold and, for snakes that derive their drinking water from dew that collects on their own scales, way too wet.
5. Snakes are escape artists, but they’d be hard pressed to get inside a tent, much less a building that was properly sealed. Honestly, you could secure a room by stuffing bedsheets along the doors.
6. Snakes don’t growl. Nor do they disconnect phone lines, in my experience.
7. Antivenom is administered intravenously, not via a syringe. And it usually takes more than one vial. Lots more.
8. At one point they’re called pit vipers; they’re actually true vipers — no heat pits.
9. According to my resident marine biologist, fish heads don’t float — especially not that high on the water.

On the other hand, they did get the garter snake, which appears at the beginning, right — it looks like, or is at least consistent with, a female Puget Sound Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis pickeringii).

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

Dr. Montgomery Montgomery’s reptile room features a menagerie of snakes and other reptiles: some computer-generated, like the Incredibly Deadly Viper, and some real. All the real snakes seem to be albinos, like the albino Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus) wrapped around Billy Connolly’s neck and the amelanistic Corn Snake (Elaphe guttata) I think I briefly saw in one shot. Then there’s Petunia, who is completely harmless and so, not milkable, but is almost certainly either a Queretaro Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis ruthveni) or one of several possible subspecies of Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum); my best guess is a nelsoni — again, an albino in either case. At least there were no egregious instances of snake blinking as occurred in the original book — or in the Harry Potter movie.

P.S. Little udders?!

Nothing, nothing nothing is worse than a bad Italian movie, except a bad Italian SF movie …Howard Waldrop

In 1984, Z-movie film director Joe D’Amato — the “Ed Wood of Italy” — released Ator l’invincible 2, which was totally not a cynical attempt to cash in on the Conan franchise. It’s better known to us as Cave Dwellers, which is the name it was released to U.S. TV in 1990 — and, more importantly, the name under which it was deservedly lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000. An incoherent mishmash of clips stolen from other movies and sloppy anachronisms, this film is not safe to watch without wiseacre robot silhouettes. Fortunately it does not seem to be available any other way.

Anyway, along the way Ator, his Asian sidekick and be-breastplated girl warrior find themselves in a temple where innocents are being sacrificed to a giant snake. (See? Nothing like Conan the Barbarian!) The serpent god itself is a foam rubber monstrosity that is only filmed in dim light, but it’s more risible than the snake Conan dispatches, if that’s even possible. But in the giant snake’s pit there are other snakes scattered about — Burmese and Reticulated Pythons (Python molurus bivittatus and P. reticulatus), which is about what you’d expect: big, Old World snakes would be the best choice, and retics are the only snakes that have been recorded to have eaten people before. Not those little specimens, though. Given D’Amato’s propensity to steal footage from other movies, I’m not sure whether he should get credit for it.

Admit it: you’ve been waiting for this one. Much has already been written about the snakes behind Snakes on a Plane, and the questionable snake behaviour and biology has been debunked elsewhere; I wrote something shortly after I saw the film myself. The key points:

1. The real, live snakes were harmless and handled by stunt doubles or extras; the venomous snakes were either computer generated or shot in isolation.
2. The real snakes were common pet-store varieties; I spotted Corn Snakes (Elaphe guttata) and several kinds of Common Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula) and Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum), for example.
3. The aggressive snake behaviour was attributed to pheromones sprayed on leis, which is creative nonsense. Pheromones will make snakes horny at best, and no one pheromone would have the same effect across so many different species.
4. The movie correctly points out that snakes aren’t normally that aggressive, hence the pheromone plot device.
5. The computer-generated snakes were larger than nature — and faster. No matter how pissed, most snakes don’t move that fast. Except maybe mambas (Dendroaspis) and coachwhips (Masticophis), and I didn’t see any of those.
6. Antivenom is easier to find than that.
7. Snakes are illegal to keep in Hawaii.
8. Pythons never eat fully grown adult males. Well, hardly ever. Yappy little dogs? Total python food. (At least I can hope.)

There must not be enough snakes in Britain, because J. K. Rowling was apparently unaware of two key snake facts when she wrote the early scene with Harry and the snake — a Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus) in the movie, a Boa Constrictor (Boa constrictor) in the book. Namely, that snakes have neither eyelids nor ears, which makes it difficult for this one to be winking at and listening to our man Harry. I’ll grant a lot for a fantasy story, mind. I mean, it’s not like owls are smart enough to be trained in postal service either.

Conan takes time out from the thieving and the plo chops to take on Sith Lord Thulsa Doom, leader of a snake cult, who himself can change into a snake. So of course our man Thulsa has a few snakes around the premises, including a big fake python with improbable fangs. Real snakes used in the movie were almost all Boa Constrictors (Boa constrictor), though I spotted at least one Yellow Anaconda (Eunectes notaeus). I couldn’t get a good look at the snake used as an arrow; my best guess is that it was a Gray Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta spiloides). That gives Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age a decidedly New World bent. Where are the Toltecs? I bet Conan would have some fun with Toltecs. Being crucified on the Tree of Woe has nothing on having your beating heart cut out.