Snake Eater

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.

This movie has some of the worst acting that I have ever seen! Some scenes are original such as the nails coming through the floor. This nail trap catches these bad guys. The rest of the movie degrades as you go. I can't believe that this movie is not even in the bottom 100 movies of all time. I also can't believe that there are sequels! The next crap movie that I want to watch is R.O.T.O.R. Could R.O.T.O.R really be much worse than this?

Now, I've seen a lot of bad movies. I like bad movies. Especially bad action movies. I've seen (and enjoyed) all of Jean-Claude Van Damme's movies, including the one where he's his own clone, both of the ones where he plays twins, and all three where he's a cyborg. I actually own the one where he plays a fashion designer and has a fight in a truck full of durians. (Hey, if nothing else, he's got a great ass and you almost always get to see it. With DVD, you can even pause and zoom in!) That's why you can trust me when I say that this movie is so bad, it makes Plan 9 look like Citizen Kane.

Everything about Snake Eater is bad. The plot is bad. The script is bad. The sets are bad. The fights are bad. The stunts are bad. The FX are bad. The acting is spectacularly, earth-time-bendingly bad, very probably showcasing the worst performance of every so-called actor in the cast, including Lorenzo Lamas, and that's really saying something. And I'd be willing to bet everyone involved with this movie is lousy in bed, to boot. ESPECIALLY Lorenzo Lamas.

It does manage to be unintentionally funny, so it's not a total loss. However, I recommend that you watch this movie only if you are either a congenital idiot or very, very stoned. I was able to sit through it myself because I needed to watch something to distract me from rinsing cat urine out of my laundry.

It didn't help much, but it was better than nothing. One point for Ron Palillo's cameo as a gay arsonist.

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.

Lorenzo Lamas stars as Soldier, a police officer and former marine (I'm guessing a Grenada vet) who unleashes the fury of hell at the expense of hillbilly rednecks who for some reason kill innocent families. (We are never offered an explanation, although i'm guessing that it is because of a lack of anything to do.) For some reason I was "blessed" with receiving all three Snake Eater movies on DVD, of course when you are in a movie club, you often times get stuff you don't ask for. While I never asked for this title, I wasn't all that upset. Indeed the title is a good chuckle since it sounds more like a porn then it does an action movie. Plus the movie is utterly ridiculous, I mean this is a movie where Lamas tries to stop a gang of gun wielding psychopaths with only a hunting knife. Although he finds a gun in the water, which he stupidly lost in the first place. (Seriously you are armed to blitz a gang of mutant hillbillies and you lose your gun!) Of course the Rambo heroics are brought full circle with lame acting, over the top action and below standard production values. Was actually made for television, and although the movie is fairly stupid, there are moments of such absurdity that this could very well have been the best TV show since the A-team. Of course what we are left with in the end is yet another Lorenzo Lamas lunkhead action flick. Let it be said though this is more interesting then his other efforts. At least what I have seen. (Not much.)

* * out of 4-(Fair)