Snake Eater

My review was written in March 1990 after watching the movie on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

This Canadian action pic has a delightfully tongue-in-cheek quality that should appeal to video fans. Pic had a theatrical run last May, starting in Nashville.

Lorenzo Lamas of tv's "Falcon Crest" shows big screen savvy in the title role, referring to an elite search & destroy unit that he served in during his marine tenure. (His nickname, however, is "soldier", stressed in a theme song.) He works as an undercover cop for explosive boss Larry Csonka, giving the ex-football star a nice little acting role.

When geeks resembling the cast of "Deliverance" kill Lams' parents and kidnap his sister he goes on the hunt. Helping out our hero is Ronnie Hawkins, as an aging biker, and pretty Josie Bell.

Helmer George Erschbamer gets good mileage out of the biker subculture and the film benefis from a catchy musical score (integrating steel drum motifs) by John Massari. A sequel toplining Lamas has already been lensed.

As an action film that one would pay to see in the theatres, yikes!!! This movie is incompetent on almost every level - BUT....for those of us who enjoy cheesy bad movies - this one is a winner. REAL bad acting, there is a guy who plays the "funny" sidekick cop to Larry Csonka, legendary Miami Dolphins running back, no less. And this guy's performance is so bad, so over the top, he makes the Dead End Kids look subtle. Lamas (who I'm sure is gorgeous to the gals) is one of the most "dead-eyed" actors I've ever seen. It is a simple revenge flick - where Lamas' parents are killed by crazed rednecks (plus they kidnap his sister - who gives a truly awful, amateurish performance). The dangerous psycho hillbillies have to be seen to be believed - talk about scenery chewing. Sheesh. Any film that has hillbillies torture people by putting them in big fluffy sleeping bags and hanging them from a tree - well, how can you not watch??

This movie's limitations in terms of acting, dialog, and plotting, are easily overcome by its consistent delivery of "entertainment value." What's more, leading man Lorenzo Lamas takes his shirt off in several scenes, baring his unshaved chest and thus significantly increasing the movie's "beefcake" factor. Curiously, there is no shot of his bare buttocks even though he strips in one scene and even though the female in this scene exposes her breasts. The only major fault in "Snake Eater" lies in its final catch-an-arsonist scene which needlessly extends the movie's running time by four or five minutes and causes it to end, disappointingly, on an anti-climactic note.

The beginning of a notoriously poor and cheap B-movie trilogy for star Lorenzo Lamas, SNAKE EATER is the pits when it comes to action. It has no money at all but it tries to deliver a tight and suspenseful scenario with plenty of gravitas and fails every time. Lamas is extraordinarily wooden as a bereaved hero who goes after a gang of kidnappers and murders hiding out in the woods. There are some cool traps at the outset and some low rent kills at the climax, but in between this is mindless stuff with little to no effort made in terms of staging or originality. The acting from the cast is abominable, and that comes from someone who's seen plenty of B-cinema.

Imagine this catches your attention because you're a fan of the Michael Dudikoff American Ninja movies and you think this could be right up there with those really well written & produced gems😆

But this movie promises some fancy fighting and maybe some super clever commando trickery, so you say "yeah, this could be fun", in a super low budget kind of way.

However, the only possible redemption is if you're high, with friends and you want a movie full of zero acting talent, terrible stunts, 4th grade dialogue, 3rd grade plot, stupidity that makes what you think is stupid - look good, and close-up zooms of Lorenzo Lamas' hairy stomach, to make fun of for 90 minutes.

But standby, because they made sequels!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!