SSSSnake, le cobra

A college student becomes lab assistant to a scientist who is working on a serum that can transform humans into snakes.

This film is far from perfect. It could use a few more horror or science fiction elements, perhaps. Where it excels is with the use of real snakes and the knowledge that the professor has. I am not a herpetologist, and would not claim to be any sort of snake expert. But when the professor is explaining different things about snakes, it sounds very real, like he really knows what he's doing. So, well done on the script.

The premise is a bit silly, but not overly so. This seems like the sort of thing that might be in a 1950s movie rather than a 1970s film from Universal. Director Bernard Kowalski (1929-2007), perhaps not surprisingly, is a veteran of such Roger Corman-produced films as "Night of the Blood Beast" and "Attack of the Giant Leeches". (Kowalski was director on both, but you can imagine that Corman had his fingers in the pie.)

It's not too bad of a film - for a B horror it's decent, kinda keeps me interested. Warning: If you have a huge fear of snakes then this film is NOT for you! They use real snakes in the making of this film.

Dr. Stoner seems to have it in his head that snakes and humans become one they will rule the planet - outlasting plagues, viruses, natural disasters, holocausts, and other things of this nature. He slowly transforms humans into the snake/human crossbreeds.

The ending could have been better: I mean David was, or looked like, a full-on King Cobra and not part human so why or how did Kristina know that snake was David? She couldn't even see his eyes because the mongoose was on the snake David. Otherwise it's a fairly decent 1970s B horror film that can entertain to a degree.

6/10

The film deals a mad doctor(Strother Martin),his former helper has disappeared and he asks to University professor(Richard B. Shull)a student. A young man called David (Richard Benedict)looking for employment is hired by the scientific.The doctor works a secrets experiments on snakes.Meanwhile David falls in love with his daughter(Heather Menzies).Then the ¨mad doctor¨ injects him a serum into becoming a King Cobra snake causing a horrible transformation.

The motion picture packs horror,romance,shocks and is quite entertained. In the film appear known actors from the 70s and 80s as Dick Benedict(¨Galactica Battlestar,A Team¨),Strother Martin(Peckimpah's usual player:¨Wild bunch¨),Heather Menzies(Robert Urich wife and little girl actress in ¨Sound of music¨)and Reb Brown(a beefcake who played many hunk men vehicles). John Chambers provides a deliriously imaginative make-up ,he won an Academy Award by the classic ¨Planet of Apes¨and made the sequels among others films(Phantom of the paradise ans Island of Dr. Moreau).Executive producers are Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown ,short time after they produced the successful ¨Jaws¨to Steven Spielberg. The motion picture is well directed by Bernard L. Kowalski who worked with Roger Corman.Slick film aimed at youthful audiences and terror lovers.

Pretty silly horror movie about Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin) who has perfected a drug that turns men into King Cobra snakes. (Yeah--I know it's ridiculous). WHY he wants to do this is never fully explained. He wants to use it on young David Blaine (Dirk Benedict)...but his daughter (Heather Menzies) is falling in love with him.

OK--the story is more than a little silly but this is fairly watchable. They used real snakes in the film (as a statement at the beginning tells us) and just watching them is pretty interesting. The story itself moves pretty quickly and (science aside) is pretty involving. The acting helps--Martin is actually not bad as the doctor; Benedict (so young and handsome) is also pretty good as Blaine and Menzies overdoes it a little (particularly in an argument with Martin) but she's not bad. There's also some fairly impressive (for the time) makeup and special effects. It's OK.

Trivia: Flashes of nudity (mostly from Menzies) are inexplicably "covered up" in the prints now in circulation. Strange--it was OK for a PG in 1973.

No snakes were harmed during the filming of this movie. The concept was interesting. A brilliant doctor has the formula to help mankind survive the event of the holocaust and other cataclysmic proportions. Think of this, a snake with the intelligence of a human. So the girlfriend of the human test subject, David, witnesses her boyfriend's demise in the freakish predicament of a snake, his precious life ends at the paws of mortality itself, the otherwise innocuous ferret, who, in this case, does not stop to think that the snake he is killing for his next meal might and could just be a human, which the very same species he depends on for his survival.

How could the so-called medical geniuses not have seen it all along, turning humans into snakes to endure the next holocaust? What are my hard earned tax dollars going toward if not funding for the study of human-snake transformation! Idiots!