SSSSnake, le cobra

We saw it back then in the seventies and were promptly scared to death by it. Set up like a mystery, you don't know what is in the back of the truck at the beginning and the gawking at the carnival freaks was pretty chilling too. Reb Brown's fate and his treatment of the pet snake were both something that made us sit up and take notice. And then there was the nosy neighbor/professor person and his destiny. The snake-handling looked very professional. Then I saw it years later. The daughter's shrieking and weeping could set your teeth on edge, the concealed nude swim scene is pretty amusing now with cartoon leaves, Benedict is completely naive and if you have no idea what to expect, you may even be rooting for him. Strother Martin was very believable as the mad doctor up to his confrontation with "Royalty". My brother said the hysterical daughter went on to pose for Playboy.

Hated her very seventies hairdo.

I have fond memories of watching this film as a kid. So often those movies you enjoyed as a kid turn out to be trash when you watch them as an adult, but this was a rare case of a movie that managed to hold up.

Sure it has it's faults, but nothing that can't be over looked. The plot is a bit silly, and the ending more so, but the way the movie is played you ignore the rampant over acting and outside of reality plot.

Plus, the film doesn't seem aged. So many films from the Seventies look so out of place looking at them in modern times, but this film managed to avoid all of the trappings that put it out of time. It holds up amazingly well for a thirty plus year old movie.

If you've seen this once and remember it fondly, i recommend a fresh look through grown up eyes.

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!

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.