Snakes on Film

I, Claudius

Jonathan Crowe — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:22:32 -0500

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.)

I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:57:44 -0500

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.

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Natural Born Killers

Jonathan Crowe — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:32:12 -0500

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.

Boa vs. Python

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:31:07 -0500

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!

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?
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.
The FBI agent finds a giant individual scale. Snakes don’t have individual scales like fish; they’re an unbroken part of the skin.
Snakes don’t have prehensile tails and don’t use them as weapons, the way, say, iguanas and monitor lizards do.
Betty is a “scarlet queen boa,” which of course does not exist.
“Most snakes are territorial, especially the big constrictors.” No; very few snakes are territorial.
No snake has a heart rate approaching 300 bpm.
Snakes swallow their food whole; they don’t bite, chew or otherwise rip it apart.
They handled the whole inter-species mating and immediate egg-laying thing reasonably enough, but snake eggshells are leathery, not brittle.
Glowing eyes?
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.

Casino Royale

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:56:08 -0500

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.

Moonraker

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:32:58 -0500

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 …

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 09:32:17 -0500

“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.

M&Ms Indiana Jones Commercial

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:22:38 -0500

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.)

We're No Angels

Jonathan Crowe — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:23:31 -0500

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.

The Devil in Miss Jones

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:58:27 -0500

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.

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Pussy Beat 2

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:44:21 -0500

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 Golden Compass

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:16:24 -0500

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.)

Copperhead Beer Commercial

Jonathan Crowe — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:00:59 -0500

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?

Women of the Prehistoric Planet

Jonathan Crowe — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 17:47:02 -0500

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.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:26:38 -0500

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.