Snakeman - Il predatore

Can bad movies ever get any worse? Maybe. But for the moment, Snakeman beats everything in its shear awfulness. The snake is just SO fake, even the one in Python would choke on its own tongue. The actors are bad, they couldn't act if there lives depended on it, even if they sold their souls to Sponge Bob Squarepants first. I don't understand why the many-headed snake is actually a good creature, it seems to enjoy tearing and ripping and killing people in various and imaginative ways, yet it gives the Mysterious Indian Tribe that Stinks its great gift of eternal youth... This mystifies me. The teams that are sent to the rather fake looking jungle seem to be well equipped with big and savage-looking automatic rifles, large vicious snakes are probably commonplace in the jungle... Not a good film, if it appears on your TV, switch the channel or it will take a little bite out of your intellect.

Okay, I liked Anacondas. I thought it was a fun, old-fashioned jungle movie. But why on earth would you pick that movie to rip-off? It strikes me as a one-time deal, and it's really amazing it turned out as good as it did. Snake King is a pretty much carbon copy, with almost all the enjoyability taken out and a ton of pretentiousness put in. It starts out looking like an enjoyably predictable jungle adventure with giant snakes and human-sacrificing tribes. However, half-way through it takes a hard right and portrays the tribe as a peaceful, wise group who will all die if the snake is killed (because the script says so, okay!). The villain, heroine, and hero are all immediately identifiable as such (incidently, the hero never does anything heroic except for arguing with the villain. otherwise he's generally being saved all the time.) The snake in the movie makes no sense. It apparently has multiple heads, but why is never even touched on, nor is it touched on how the water gives you immortal life, or anything (the snake, like the tribe, is allowed a certain "heroic" stance, despite the fact that it was just scene killing many people in gruesome ways, like the tribe. But, you know, PC). Ultimately, not a movie to waste your time on, except perhaps from a bad DTV standpoint, but even then the lack of anything interesting for the monster to do (and the attempts to make it seem less of a monster for no reason) does take away considerably from the fun.

I was real surprised with "Snakeman". It was actually a pretty good little independent movie. First, it was well shot. The director chose to use film instead of digital (which a lot of B-movies) do. And there were some great jungle shots of the Amazon. Second, the movie was fairly well acted. I really thought everyone in the film was a pretty seasoned actor. Stephen Baldwin was definitely a good hero. Third, they had some real cool production design. They had snake pillars in the jungle. I love that whole look.

The only real downside was that there were some fairly bad CGI shots of the snake. But, it's definitely entertaining if you're looking for that whole "monster in the jungle" concept.

It seems that many of the reviewers missed the point of this story, and that shaved a couple of points off of their review. Maybe they think they are entitled, as the characters did, to whatever they see in the world.

The premise is that a body is excavated/retrieved from a river, and the person was 300 yrs old when they died. Fountain of youth. Only catch is, the people that live there are in a symbiotic relationship with a huge dragon-looking snake, that later reveals two more heads. Then it suddenly has 5 or 6 heads. Very Hydra-esque. No explanation was given. Nor was one given for how the chieftan speaks English fluently, though it does make speaking with our heroine easier.

Baldwin shows why he is the third best actor in his family, (though probably the best human being), as he is the typical "jungle survivalist" tough guy. The girl is the real lead, and is decent. The corporate guys are all idiots who refuse to listen to the people they paid to guide them. The CGI is weak, and the natives range from hot babes to guys who look really out of place in the jungle. Not great, or even good. Typical Sci-fi fare.

Someone at the Sci-Fi Channel must have thought making a movie about a giant, five-headed snake in the Amazon would make for a nifty monster movie. It probably could have if it hadn't been for the fact that the giant, five-headed snake is so huge that we generally only see one, two, or three heads on the screen at any given time. That is until the climax of the movie when all five are finally shown, albeit briefly, and even then you never really get a full body view of the creature to figure out how everything is interconnected. The movie establishes that the snake has a tail so they can't use the excuse of it having heads at both ends. I want to know where the hell the fourth and fifth heads disappeared to for the first three quarters of the movie. Were they on a smoke break? Were they given conscientious objector status for refusing to take part in the killing if innocent people? Were they off auditioning for a role in Python 3?

Oh, but wait, there are still more problems with the giant, five-headed snake. Despite the fact that it appears to be big enough to give Godzilla a heck of a fight, this colossal, multi-headed snake is still able to hide undetected in the jungle brush until it's too late. The noise it makes when slithering through the jungle is minimal and keep in mind we are talking about an enormous monster with five-heads, each at least the size of an automobile. If it wasn't constantly roaring (This snake doesn't hiss. It roars.), then it would barely generate any noise at all. People are constantly running away before coming to a stop and looking up just in time for one of the heads to lurch down and nab them. Despite being gigantic it still consistently managed to not only move around unseen, it actually sneaks up on people.

And if that wasn't enough, there are some serious continuity issues regarding the giant, five-headed snakes' size. It appears to suffer from Deep Star Six syndrome, and by that I mean its size changes depending on what is required of it in the scene. This is highlighted in the climax set inside its lair where it seems to shrink and enlarge at random. Each head is the size of an automobile and its cave entrance only appears big enough to fit one head and neck at a time so we don't even get an explanation as to how the thing even manages to get inside this cave chamber to begin with. Heck, at one point, this gargantuan serpent even manages to hide underwater in a small river just waiting to spring out and surprise someone. Good grief!

These are just the problems with the monster. And don't argue suspension of disbelief because there is a huge difference between suspension of disbelief and insulting one's intelligence. Worst of all, the CGI used to bring the giant, five-headed snake is some of the least convincing I've ever seen in a Sci-Fi Channel movie, and believe me, that is really saying something.

The fact that the monster turned out to be such a conceptual catastrophe is kind of a good thing because I'd hate to see a potentially cool movie monster wasted on a production as lame, formulaic, and downright dull as this stinker was. A complete waste of time and energy.