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!

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This low-rent action-comedy buddy flick, a lame atrocity courtesy of Chuck Norris and Cannon Films that, for some reason, is uncontaminated by firewalking (or continuity, or coherence), has a couple of snake scenes meant to represent some homogenized extruded Native American spiritual product. Both feature, as far as I can tell, boa constrictors, which are at least native to the vague area Norris, Gossett and Company appear to be operating in (geography is not a strong point of this movie). In the first scene, the villain appears to be performing some sparkly native magic with a snake — it’s probably meant to evoke the Hopi snake dances, but this is nowhere close in meaning or appearance (or snake used). In the second scene, a young woman sent to kill our heroes apparently transforms into a boa as a way of escaping.

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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.

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On a tour of the rainforest in Costa Rica, the kids encounter a coral snake that promptly bites, kills and swallows their local guide, pooping out the bones and clothes seconds later. Is there any need for me to comment on this? Sure, coral snakes are dedicated snake eaters and, while venomous, are less prone to bite people than other snakes, and hardly any snake on the planet can swallow a person whole, but really, that’s completely missing the whole point, isn’t it?

This episode is available online in the United States; here’s the relevant clip.

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“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).

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Oh look, Harrison Ford is working with snakes again. Blade runner Rick Deckard tracks down the first of four replicants by using the scale of an artificial snake to find Zhora, who uses a snake in her exotic dance act. The snake manufacture Deckard interrogates has a young Boa Constrictor around his neck; I can’t make out the species of snake in the foreground cage in that scene. Zhora’s snake is a young light-phase Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus); the Wikipedia entry says the snake belonged to the actress (I wouldn’t have figured Joanna Cassidy as a snake keeper). The main problem with this plotline is that snake scales are not like fish scales: they’re ridges of a single piece of skin, not individual scales, and don’t come off like fish scales. How else do you think that snakes shed their skins in a single piece?

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Monsterpiece Theater’s take on Howards End is Howard, a rattlesnake with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Le groan.

Corn Snakes appear in the final episode of NCIS’s second season: first in the teaser, where the victims swerve to avoid one on the road while their assassins run it over; and second, when one wraps itself around Kate’s leg at the crime scene. Tony makes a big scene about its presence, pretending that it’s venomous and making an exaggerated attempt to unwrap it from Kate; McGee spoils Tony’s fun by IDing it as a Corn Snake and asking to hold it. Everything here is accurate: they use a real Corn Snake (though it’s obvious that a fake one was run over); Corn Snakes are found in Virginia; and holding one is the sensible thing to do — they are, after all, the most popular pet snake in the world. Though they’re not necessarily tame in the wild.

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There was a second Sammy the Snake on Sesame Street; whereas his 1971 appearance was an original and classic song; his reappearance in May 1988 with guest star Carol Channing, singing Hello, Sammy! — i.e., a spoof of “Hello, Dolly!” with snake- and letter-S-friendly lyrics — was, well, less memorable and more risible. (“You make me glow, Sammy / ’Cause you’re so … clammy”?)

It’s quite possible that Sammy the Snake was my first exposure to the idea of a snake. First broadcast in late 1971 as part of Sesame Street’s third season and presumably broadcast many times thereafter, the catchy song was also included on several Sesame Street albums, including the 1996 two disc-set Sing the Alphabet, which is still available. So I guess it’s a classic.

What, were you expecting me to point out that snakes can’t sing or something?

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You wouldn’t normally see a Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus), albino or otherwise, in an exhibit otherwise filled with African animals, coming-to-life-due-to-an-Egyptian-artifact or otherwise. Last I checked, Burma (Myanmar, whatever) wasn’t in Africa. What you want is an African Rock Python (Python sebae), which, as far as I know, doesn’t come in albino. Mind you, African Rock Pythons are pretty unpleasant snakes (certainly compared to the more placid Burmese), so maybe you don’t want one of them.

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Cartoons with anthropomorphic animal characters are a special case here on Snakes on Film: when you’re dealing with a movie full of intelligent talking animals, you can hardly quibble about snakes with blinking eyes, eyebrows and eyelashes — even flowers in their hair on their head — and that can hear other characters and talk back to them. Pointing out that snakes are deaf and don’t have eyelids is kind of beside the point. Pandas can’t talk either, you know.

But I do have one bone to pick about the highly enjoyable Kung Fu Panda: if one of your kung fu masters is a viper, wouldn’t it make sense for said viper to do what vipers do naturally, rather than try to thwack, strangle and otherwise hiiii-yaa their opponents. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Viper to have inflicted a venomous KUNG FU NOM on Tai Lung? Otherwise, what’s the point of being a viper?

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Snakes make several appearances in this, possibly the most morally objectionable of the Bond films (as opposed to merely sad and risible). In one of the opening scenes, a man is bitten to death by a snake during what is purportedly some voodoo ceremony. The snake appears to be an Emerald Tree Boa (Corallus caninus), though I suppose it could also be a Green Tree Python (Morelia viridis) a long way from home — I’m not that good at telling the difference. Although a tree boa’s bites are pretty nasty thanks to its long sharp pointy teeth, it’s decidedly nonvenomous and would not kill with a single nick. The snake makes a second appearance toward the end of the movie, along with a number of other snakes kept in a coffin; those snakes include Boa Constrictors (Boa constrictor), Burmese Pythons (Python molurus bivittatus) and a few colubrids that are probably rat snakes. It goes without saying that pythons don’t belong in the Caribbean.

Neither, for that matter, do Speckled Kingsnakes (Lampropeltis getula holbrooki), one of which threatens Bond in his bathroom about half an hour in. Now I’ve kept two speckled kings, and while they do have a tendency to chew on your fingers, they’re quite harmless; Bond’s dispatching of said snake with an aerosol fireball is wholly gratuitous. It wasn’t even all that big a kingsnake.

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Two brief scenes involving snakes in this late Moore-era Bond flick. In the first, Bond meets his Indian contact, Vijay, whose cover is as a snake charmer. “This was the wrong cover,” he says. “I hate snakes.” The actor playing Vijay, Vijay Amritraj, was reportedly terrified of snakes himself — and you won’t see him in many closeups with the cobras in the baskets. Even so, I strongly suspect the cobras being used were venomoid (i.e., their fangs were removed). They certainly didn’t look fake. In the second scene, Bond escapes from the villain’s lair into the jungle, where he encounteres many interesting animals. While hiding motionless from the hunting party, a snake crawls over him. “Hiss off,” he says. I can’t identify the species (they did film in India), but it does rather look like a harmless colubrid.

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