Snakes on Film

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.

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.