Snaker

Director: Mr Fai Samang
Writers: Mr Fai Sam Ang, Mrs Mao Samnang
Producer: Mr Thunya Nilklang
Cast: Mr Vinal Kraybotr (Winai Kraibutr), Miss Pich Chan Barmey, Mr Tep Rindaro, Mrs Om Portevy
Year of release: 2001
Country: Cambodia/Thailand
Reviewed from: Hong Kong VCD (Winson Entertainment)

Now this is a film I’ve been wanting to see for a while, the first Cambodian feature film for years (even if it is a co-production with a Thai company) and a premier example of the prolific snake-woman genre.

Nhi (Om Portevy aka Ampor Tevy, star of a popular TV soap) lives in the forest with her boorish, alcoholic husband Manop and their about-twelve-year-old daughter Ed. One day Nhi and Ed encounter a giant, talking snake in the forest while looking for bamboo shoots - they have lost their spade and the snake agrees to let them have it back if Nhi will love him and be his wife. Mohap is away in the city (where he sells jewellery) so that night the giant snake crawls into Nhi’s bed and transforms into a handsome man who makes love to her. Afterwards, Nhi is frequently seen by her daughter stroking the snake and talking lovingly to it.

I tell you, folks, this thing is a Freudian’s dream!

In the city we meet rich art dealer Wiphak and his wife Buppha, who is pregnant. When their friends Pokia and Mora discover this, Mora decides to become pregnant too and goes to a local witch for a potion which will make Pokia subservient to her, and therefore compliable.

Back in the forest, Mopak returns and notices Nhi’s bump, the result of her tryst with the Snake King (he’s not actually named as such, but one of the alternative English language titles of this film is The Snake King’s Daughter). Mopak accuses his wife of being unfaithful because they haven’t had sex for months, but she points out that no-one else lives within miles of them and claims that he was drunk at the time.

Ed tells her father about the snake but begs him not to hurt her mother. He follows his daughter to where the snake lives and cuts its head off. This is very clearly a genuine shot of a live snake being cut in two with a machete, and though it’s brief it’s a bit disturbing. He also makes Nhi eat the cooked snake meat. Then he takes her to the river, ostensibly to bathe, where he kills her for being unfaithful by slicing open her swollen belly. Out pours plenty of blood and a dozen or so small snakes which Manop kills (again for real). One tiny snake escapes and as Manop goes after it he slips on a rock and falls on his own sword. Ed finds her dead parents and also slips on a rock, cracks her head open and dies.

But a passing holy man finds the surviving snakelet and sees it transform into a baby as the sun rises. He takes the child home, naming it Soraya after the sun.

Scoot forward ten years or so and Soraya is a girl, rebellious but not disrespectful, living in a cave with her ‘grandfather’. But she is not any girl, for her head is a mass of writhing snakes!

This is one of the most interesting aspects of this film. Famously, when Hammer Films made The Gorgon in 1964, actress Barbara Shelley offered to play the title role wearing a headpiece with some live grass snakes attached (provided that the RSPCA were happy with the set-up). Unfortunately, the producers decided instead to depict the transmogrified version of Shelley’s character using a different actress (Prudence Hyman) with a headpiece that looked fine in stills but was obviously a bunch of rubber snakes when seen on screen.

Snakes are supposed to move. They writhe, they wriggle. And these ones do!

Because the makers of Snaker have used that very same technique: most of the snakes are actually still rubber but there are enough live ones attached to provide sufficient movement that it genuinely does look like a writhing mass of snakes on the actress’ head. It was astounding enough when Nhi lay down with the giant snake - a huge python (I think) which must have been twelve feet long if it was an inch. And it was disturbing enough when we had that real snake-beheading shot. But here we have live snakes not just stuck on somebody’s head but stuck on the head of a thirteen-year-old girl!

The actress who plays young Soraya, it must be said, is very good anyway (so was the girl playing Ed, to be fair) but for her to be able to act while live snakes hang in front of her face is surely worthy of some sort of award. (According to a piece about this film in the New York Times, young Soraya is played by Ms Danh Monica, although there is no name like that in the credits.)

Anyway, down at the river Soraya - with her head covered - meets three children of about her age (ten or eleven). These are Veha, son of the kindly Wiphak and Buppha (who died in childbirth), and Kiri and Reena, son and daughter of the snobbish Pokia and Mora. Veha and Reena are devoted to each other, according to their parents at least. Soraya asks to join their game of hide and seek, and though Veha is welcoming, Reena is rude and asks her brother to get rid of the new girl. He pulls the wrap from Soraya’s head - and the three children understandably run away screaming, while Soraya returns, tearfully to her grandfather.

A caption tells us it’s ten years later, so of course by now all four kids are young men and women. Returning to the river, kind-hearted Veha (Vinal Kraybotr: Nang Nak, Krai Thong, Kaew Kon Lek) gets into a fight with aggressive Kiri, who pushes him over a waterfall. Kiri and his sister head back to town and tell a distraught Wiphak that his son fell accidentally and, though they searched, there was no sign of him.

But of course, Veha isn’t dead - he is found and nursed back to health by Soraya, now played by Pich Chan Barmey (aka Pich Chanboramey). He’s handsome, she’s beautiful; his name means sky, hers means sun; they both have good hearts - so of course they start to fall for each other, especially as Grandfather has given Soraya a magic ring which transforms her snakes into beautiful long hair.

Veha and Soraya return to his overjoyed father, where Reena is understandably jealous of the new arrival because she and Veha have technically been engaged since they were children. Mora and Reena go to see the old witch who gives them some more of the bewitching potion that worked twenty years earlier on Pokia; they put it in Veha’s goblet at dinner but Soraya’s magic ring warns her and she knocks it from the table.

The witch works out that Soraya is a snake - not a reincarnation of a snake but the real thing - but that her magic powers will be lost if she loses her virginity. So Kiri sneaks into Wiphak’s house and tries to rape Soraya, but her hair turns back into snakes, one of which falls off and bites Kiri, killing him instantly.

There then follows one of the most unsubtle tourism product placements you are ever likely to see, although as Snaker was the first Cambodian feature film to receive international distribution for many years, it is perhaps allowable. Veha and Soraya spend several minutes wandering around the magnificent ruins of Ankor Wat, and Veha tells her that his love for her is as strong and everlasting as the temple walls.

Eventually, the two young lovers do sleep together, and while Veha sleeps, Soraya finds patches of snake skin on her arms. She runs back to her grandfather, but Mora and Reena appear with the old witch, who battles the holy man in a pretty cool magic fight, which leaves both of them dead. Mora and Reena run away but are bitten by a snake, as Kiri was. The Snake King reappears, along with the magically revived grandfather, and they use their combined power to make Soraya fully, permanently human - just as Veha appears to sweep her off her feet and carry her home.

What a great film! It’s got romance, action, intrigue, fantasy, and even a travelogue in the middle. It does have at least one snake deliberately and unpleasantly killed in the name of entertainment, which may be okay in Cambodia but is not a terribly bright idea for a potential export. But given how out of step with global popular culture the Cambodians were during - and in the wake of - the Khmer Rouge regime, again this is sort of allowable.

Pol Pot and his secret police outlawed all forms of popular entertainment including cinemas, so making a Cambodian film was a bit of a gamble as far as domestic distribution goes. It was apparently shown drive-in style at various outside venues. It must be said that, for a country with effectively no cinema industry, this is a fine-looking film. The cinematography is excellent (Mr Saray Chat is credited as cameraman) and the production values are well above the B-movie level that one might expect given the film’s origins. There is no actual special effects credit, but Mr Chhun Achom was responsible for the make-up, which may or may not include getting actresses to wear snakes on their heads!

Translating from the Thai alphabet into English is always a matter of debate and creates different spellings, so the actor credited on screen as ‘Mr Vinal Kraybotr’ is also listed on various websites as Vinai Kraybotr, Winai Kraibutr and Winai Kraibutra. And the writer/director’s name is spelled differently in each of his on-screen credits! The packaging calls the film Snaker although the on-screen English title is Snakers. The original title is generally given as something like Kuon Pus Keng Kang which everyone seems to agree means ‘The Snake King’s Child’ although apparently it was filmed as just Pus Keng Kang (or Pos Kairng Korng or whatever) which was the title used for the first of four Cambodian versions of this much-filmed story (the second was called Neang Lavear Haik and the third was Neang Preay Sork Pos). I have also found the film listed as Snaker: Ghost Wife 2 which is a translation of the Chinese title which markets the film as a fake sequel to Ghost Wife (ie. Nang Nak). Having seen this and Ngoo Keng Kong I definitely want to see more snake-woman films - this is my new mission!

This VCD is not a terribly good transfer, though it is widescreen. Perhaps it’s just my copy, but neither disc loaded straight off and both, when cleaned enough to load properly, jammed every 10-15 seconds for the first five minutes. In addition, the sound on disc 2 was way, way quieter than on disc 1. However, reviews of the DVD (also from Winson) say that the quality is not much better on that and there are no extras, so I can’t really complain. The subtitles are full of mistakes; I’m sure whoever did them speaks much better English than my Thai (or Cambodian or Chinese), but I can never understand why they don’t check with a native English speaker before putting the subs on the disc....

The disc also includes a trailer for the Jean-Claude Van Damme SF actioner Replicant (Van Damme fighting himself - blimey, there’s an idea that has only been done about eight times before).

MJS rating: A-
Review originally posted 27th November 2007.

Umbrage: The First Vampire

Director: Drew Cullingham
Writer: Drew Cullingham
Producers: Drew Cullingham, Charlie Falconer
Cast: Doug Bradley, Rita Ramnani, Jonnie Hurn
Country: UK
Year of release: 2011
Reviewed from: screener (Left Films)

‘Umbrage’ is a great word, isn’t it? It stems from the Latin ‘umbra’ meaning ‘shadow’, from whence we also derive such brilliant words as ‘penumbra’, ‘adumbrate’ and, of course, ‘umbrella.’ Its only previous significant artistic use that I know of was ‘Takin’ Umbrage’ by The Federation, a 1988 comedy single which spoofed The Archers.

Now here comes Umbrage: The First Vampire; no relation to Blood: The Last Vampire and the vampire here isn’t called Umbrage, although there is some talk of shadows. It was shot as just Umbrage.

First: confession time. I was really looking forward to watching Umbrage, which has a cool-looking trailer and some reliable people in front of and behind the camera. But despite my best efforts to enjoy the film, I found it disappointing, frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying. Which is a real shame, because it’s trying to do something different and in many respects does it well.

It is, for example, a good-looking movie. Any time I see James Friend’s name in the credits I know I’m in for a visual treat. For my money, he’s one of the best cinematographers working in British indie films. The production design by Charlie Falconer is also good and Scott Orr (The Zombie Diaries) provides a small number of decent gore effects.

Where the film falls down, as so often, is in the script. Drew Cullingham was writer, director, producer (with Falconer) and editor. When a single individual has that much input into a film, there’s potential for a pure, unsullied, personal vision to shine through - but there’s equal potential for major problems to be glossed over or ignored.

The threat here is ill-defined, and that’s a serious problem in a horror movie. It’s never clear what sort of danger our characters are in or why, so it’s difficult to feel any tension or indeed empathy. The threat is vampiric, but the vampire’s motivation is not clear and, in fact, that’s the greater problem right there. None of the characters have a clear motivation for their actions and as a result their actions don’t make sense.

Everything that every character does in a film has to be for a reason. It has to serve a purpose. Actually two purposes. It has to serve a narrative purpose, either progressing the plot or revealing the character (or both) but it must also serve a purpose within the reality of the story. It has to be exactly the sort of thing which that character would do in that situation. And if it’s strange or odd or unlikely or very different to what most people would do in a similar situation, then that difference must be justified and explained, whether at the time or retrospectively.

For example, imagine that you are a husband with a heavily pregnant wife expecting your first child. Would you, only days before the baby is due, in the middle of winter, move into an isolated 17th century farmhouse 20 miles from the nearest town which has no telephone connection and no mobile signal?

Or perhaps you’re going camping in the woods with your mate. (Actually, does anyone outside of horror films realy go camping in the woods? Everyone I’ve ever known who likes camping pitches their tent in fields, or maybe on moorland, or maybe (if they’ve got any sense) on a campsite. Or if they’ve really got sense, they stay in a hotel. But who camps in a wood?)

Anyway, you and your mate have pitched your tent amid the trees and necked a bottle or two of wine when a softly-spoken, attractive young woman appears, not wearing any sort of outdoor gear, claiming to be a birdwatcher looking for owls. After a few minutes, she leads your horny friend off into the darkness and shortly afterwards you hear him scream in terror. You find him, trouserless, face and crotch both full of blood, his dismembered member a few feet away. The girl, who is calm and bloodless and gives every impression of being on drugs, tells you that “the shadows came alive.”

Would you leave your critically injured mate there to die, not even bothering to offer him any comfort, and leg it through the trees with the apparently stoned girl? Really? Why would you do that when the most likely explanation is that your friend was attacked by either her or an accomplice?

Now go back to pretending you’re the expectant father. In the middle of the night, two strangers bang on your farmhouse door. One is in a panic and has obviously been drinking heavily, the other appears to be blissed out. The panicky one reckons that the silent, smily one told him that “the shadows came alive” and that’s why you must let them in because they’re in terrible danger.

I realise that you, in this role-play, cannot call the cops because you have no phone (though you do at least own a shotgun). Nevertheless, would you just invite this drunkard and his junkie girlfriend into your house to sit down next to your already stressed, heavily pregnant wife?

Do you see what I’m getting at here? One more for good luck. Our dad-to-be (played, did I mention, by Doug Bradley) is an antiques dealer and he has come into possession, somehow, of a large Babylonian obsidian mirror (obsidian is a kind of black, volcanic glass). I’m not sure the Babylonians made mirrors from obsidian (though the Aztecs did). Anyway, this thing is absolutely priceless, the oldest known example, in perfect condition - so why would you have it delivered by courier to an uninhabited farmhouse with instructions to just leave it in the barn? And why, having taken it out of its rather rudimentary packaging, would you be careful to remove the cardboard and paper from the barn but leave this 5,000-year-old, irreplaceable artefact propped up on a hay-bale where it could easily get scratched, knocked or broken?

All of these actions (and others) serve a purpose in progressing the plot but serve no purpose within the reality of the film. Time after time, characters behave in a way which is illogical, inexplicable or just downright nonsensical - but expedient. These are all the sorts of problems which should have been sorted out before the film got anywhere near even pre-production. This is why you do multiple drafts of scripts. And at every stage, the writer (or the director or producer - except here they’re all the same guy) should ask the questions that viewers and reviewers will ask. Why is he doing that? Why did she go there? What is the reason behind this decision that nobody in their right mind would make?

Let me give you a practical example, to prove that I’m not just blowing smoke rings here. I was recently doing some writing-for-hire on a script about a Victorian dentist whose schtick is that he makes the best dentures in London. He manufactures false teeth that are better and more realistic than even the finest porcelain, so that none of his competitors can work out how he does it. The dentist’s secret is that he steals teeth from orphans (the rotter!) and then has them polished to perfection by a colony of captive tooth fairies (the swine!).

All well and good, but if I was reviewing a film like that I would ask three pertinent questions (as, I’m sure, would you). (1) Why don’t the other dentists just assume that these perfect false teeth are made from real teeth? That’s kind of the obvious explanation, isn’t it? (2) How would this work, given that children’s teeth are significantly smaller than adult teeth? And would get even smaller if you polished them? (3) Why does he need the tooth fairies? Any fool with a magnifying glass can polish a tooth.

One Sunday morning I was lying in bed, turning things over in my mind, and came up with the following.

The only way to make false adult teeth from children’s teeth is to use three or four child teeth for each adult one, carefully cut and shaped into perfect building blocks. Such precision dental engineering, and the polishing of cracks between blocks to the point of invisibility, is the sort of thing that would be virtually impossible for even the most careful person - but not for tooth fairies. And because small children’s milk teeth have a different structure and slightly different chemical composition to adult teeth, when the other dentists examine these gnashers they can see that they are plainly not just polished human teeth, but they can’t work out what they are.

All three problems solved in one fell swoop. If that film gets made (and if they use anything from my draft) we won’t have audiences asking those three obvious questions.

So, Umbrage-makers, this is what should have been done here. A coherent, credible reason needed to be found for the antiques dealer to cut his family off from civilisation just before the baby is due; for the camper to abandon his gruesomely injured, dying friend without so much as a backwards glance; for the obsidian mirror to be in the barn; and all the rest of the script’s improbable unlikelihoods.

Jacob (Bradley) and his wife Lauren (Grace Vallorani: The Last Seven) are accompanied by Rachel (Rita Ramnani: Jack Says, Just for the Record, Strippers vs Werewolves), his resentful 18-year-old goth stepdaughter from a previous marriage which ended with Rachel’s mother’s suicide just a year ago. So crikey, he wasted no time, did he? Jacob and Rachel share a secret which, when we learn it towards the end of the film, actually shows that they are both terrible people, but at about the same time their characters clumsily change, especially Rachel’s, so that we are apparently supposed to like them and empathise with them even more.

Camping pals Stanley (James Fisher: Hellbride, The Devil’s Music) and Travis (Scott Thomas, also in The Devil’s Music) would seem to be significant among this small cast and we spend quite a lot of time with them but, in retrospect, it can be seen that they are entirely irrelevant to the actual plot. There is no indication of why the girl Lilith (Natalie Celino, who was in unreleased 2008 action-horror pic Furor: Rage of the Innocent) kills Travis, nor of why she doesn’t kill Stanley.

Lilith is, of course, a vampire. She’s actually the mother of all vampires, the woman who, according to some ancient Jewish legends, was Adam’s first wife before Eve was created from one of his ribs, who was later seduced by the archangel Sammael, an analog of Satan. A prologue set in the old west has tall, fit cowboy Phelan (Jonnie Hurn, who was the wheelchair-bound stepfather in Penetration Angst and also in both Zombie Diaries pictures) hunting down stout cowboy Sammaelson (AJ Williams or, as the IMDB has it, Aj Williams) but being attacked by Lilith who bites a chunk from his neck. This, I suppose, is how he becomes The First Vampire.

Sammaelson is, therefore, either the devil or the son of the devil, but this sort of thing can only be gleaned from the Making Of, not the feature itself, where it is explained by ‘AJ Williams’ under his real name of Drew Cullingham.

This prologue and a subsequent, largely incomprehensible flashback, were shot on 35mm in the fake western town of Laredo, Kent, which I think is where a certain 3D comedy horror western musical was filmed. Everything else was shot on the Red camera. Thing is, the 35mm wild west scenes have then been tinted sepia, thus completely negating James Friend’s cinematographic skills. What’s the point of that?

Phelan turns up in Jacob’s barn 120 years later, still wearing a stetson but otherwise dressed in 21st century cowboy casual. He has been searching for Lilith all that time to take his revenge. I’m not sure what part the obsidian mirror plays in all this but at the end the two supernatural beings somehow disappear into the stygian reflector and reappear in Chiselhurst Caves.

Just in case we weren’t sure that this is the quasi-Biblical Lilith, there is also a flashback to, good grief, the Garden of Eden. Wait, is this a creationist horror film? Lilith is naked and so is Adam (Jason Croot, writer-director of horror mockumentary Le Fear) who is portrayed as a sort of Cro-Magnon caveman so maybe it’s not creationist after all.

NB. All my knowledge of Lilith was gained from her entry in Wikipedia and it’s quite possible that this was where Cullingham did his research too, as her appearance in the caves is obviously modelled on the 1892 John Collier painting at the top of her Wiki-page (complete with very large, very real snake draped around Ms Ramnani’s curvaceous, naked frame).

As for the shadows, I’m really not sure what’s going on there. At one point Stanley and Rachel are both attacked, quite savagely, by something invisible while they’re outside but Lilith sits placidly indoors. What are these ‘shadows’? What connection do they have to Lilith? And why did anyone think it would be scary in any way to have characters attacked by invisible things in the dark?

Umbrage is a mishmash of ideas that hasn’t been properly worked out. I’m all for horror westerns: Cowboys and Zombies was terrific. I’ve nothing against British westerns, not that’s there’s many to choose from. But trying to combine vampirism with the wild west and ancient Talmadic myths, all in a contemporary rural setting, centred on a dysfunctional family is a step too far, especially when there’s no real thought given to coherent motivation for any of the characters.

I feel a bit bad knocking the film like this because clearly Cullingham and his cast and crew worked very hard. The Making Of reveals a host of problems from malfunctioning generators on night shoots to Celino suffering an injury during a fight. A massive snow-fall halfway through production had to be incorporated into continuity and some of the shooting days lasted for more than 24 hours solid.

But this Making Of fails even more than the feature, skirting around what sounds like a real struggle against the odds to concentrate on amateurish shaky-cam interviews with clearly distracted cast and crew, of the sadly traditional “What are you doing now?”/”Can you describe your character?” type. Special sympathy for Scott Orr who graciously tries to answer the single most inane question ever included in a Making Of featurette: “So what’s it like being a Scottish special effects artist?”

Interwoven with these uninformative, uninteresting soundbites is a pretentiously black and white sit-down interview, post-completion, with Cullingham in what looks like a fancy restaurant or bar. While he is able to offer some insight into aspects of the film that don’t come across, he sounds smug, self-satisfied and complacent. Extraordinarily, the on-screen interviewer, ‘Making-of documentary director Ian Manson’, captions himself not just once but three times - in a film which is only about 20 minutes long! No offence, mate, but not only did we see the caption the first time, but also: we really don’t care.

Given the troubles and travails of the production, this Making Of is a huge missed opportunity for a sort of low-rent Lost in La Mancha. Consider what Anthony Pedone managed with Camp Casserole despite the film under scrutiny running smoothly without a single problem, what could a really good director have made of The Making of Umbrage? In fact, this could have been one of those rare situations where a DVD is recommended on the basis of an okay film accompanied by excellent extras, But instead we just get 20 minutes of dad-can-I-borrow-the-camcorder interview clips with bored, tired cast and crew who have nothing to say, plus the black and white Ian Manson show.

I was disappointed with Umbrage because it wasn’t the film I was looking forward to, but I was really disappointed with the Making Of because it wasn’t the film it so obviously could have been. Also on the disc are a trailer, a music video (for the song in the trailer) and the full version of the Doug Bradley interview from the Making Of, in which he starts by patiently explaining that he’s best known for playing Pinhead in Hellraiser. Doug’s a pro and he’s used to this sort of thing by now. Since I last saw him on the set of Pumpkinhead 3, he has appeared in (or provided a voice for) a range of UK and US features including The Cottage, Ten Dead Men, Jack Falls, The Infliction and most recently The Reverend.

Mention should be made of the Umbrage soundtrack which features a range of interesting ‘new country’ tracks that give the film a very unusual feel. In many ways, the music is the best part: strikingly original, well-chosen, integrated with the action but never dominating. And often toe-tappingly good - yeeha! The actual music credit is ‘Captain Bliss and Huskie Jack’, two musos who have, very impressively, toured as part of John Mayall’s band!

On the aural downside, whenever character voices are distorted in spooky, demonic ways, they become nigh on impossible to understand. Victoria Broom (Zombie Women of Satan, Dead Cert, Forest of the Damned 2) is credited with ‘special FX voices’.

James Friend’s other recent credits include Stalker, Dead Cert, Jack Falls and Ghosted. Scott Orr worked on Evil Aliens and A Day of Violence while make-up artist Pippa Woods has a CV that includes The Reeds, Stalker, Doghouse and Elfie Hopkins. Cullingham and Falconer have also worked (as DP/co-writer and production designer) on Tim Biddiscombe’s thriller NightDragon (also with Fisher and Thomas in the cast). A significant number of the cast and crew worked on The Zombie Diaries or its sequel and that film’s Michael Bartlett gets a curious credit here as ‘guest director’.

If you want a British vampire western, this is probably the best you can pick. Doug Bradley buckles down to his usual reliable performance, some of the other acting is also good (some less so) and there are some clever moments. But Umbrage - which was retitled A Vampire's Tale in the States -  could have been so much better and its problems stem not from any unexpected snowfall or malfunctioning generator but from a poor script which was nowhere near ready to shoot.

MJS rating: C+

Review originally posted 17th September 2011

The Poison

Director: Ch Ratchapol
Writer: Yodnam
Producer: Jirun Rattanaviriyachai
Cast: Nantawat Arsirapojanakul, Julaluck Kittiyarat, Sushao Phongwilai
Year of release: 2002
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD

In the jungles of Thailand, a group of young men gather, armed with swords and bows. In another part of the forest, atop a sort of altar thing, a ceremony is taking place. A young woman in a white dress stands before a priest. Behind her is an older woman (her mother?) in a blue dress, and numerous villagers are stood around.

The girl in white (let’s call her Su) gives the priest a small statue. He invites her to touch a sort of stone font with a candle in the centre; when she does so a small, golden snake magically appears from her arm and melts into a pool of blood-like liquid which runs down carved grooves in the stone into a brass cup. The priest takes this cup and anoints a baby held by one of the other women.

Suddenly the men we saw at the start attack, brutally cutting down men and women left right and centre. There are even young boys of 12 or 13 hacking away with their swords. Only Su (Julaluck Kittiyarat aka Ying Jularuck, also in epic mermaid-vs-giant fantasy Phra-Apai-Mani), her mother and the priest escape to a big temple, but the young men follow them there. The priest is cut down, Su’s mother is grabbed and spits two jets of poison from her open mouth into a man’s face, but is then killed with a flaming arrow in the back.

Bad idea. Su glowers, her eyes glow, her skin starts to change colour, and before our eyes she transforms into an eighty-foot long giant cobra! She whips men with her tail, crushes men in her coils - and we even get a quick POV shot as she eats one whole.

Eleven minutes in and this is instantly the best snake-woman film I have ever seen! (And regular readers will know that it’s a genre I’m very fond of!) This isn’t just a very large snake, this is a supernaturally giant serpent rendered in very good CGI. If Bert I Gordon was alive today and making snake-woman films, this is what he would make.

The only downside is that this VCD, distributed by Right Beyond, has no English subtitles. That’s why Su (and everyone else) will have to have made-up names in this review. There are apparently English subs on the DVD - maybe I should have spent that extra five dollars.

One hundred years later...

Five young men and a woman, laden with cameras and video-cameras, arrive at the altar. I think they’re shooting some footage for the Discovery Channel or something. The altar looks a good location but one guy (let’s call him Andy) is unhappy about shooting at what was obviously once a sacred place. So they all pack their equipment again and set off. Across a river, through an amazing cave.

As they walk through the jungle, Andy is suddenly shot dead. And so are three of the others. This is a shocker. We’ve spent the past ten minutes with these people and assumed that they were the main characters. Now suddenly they’re under attack from a couple of dozen bandits armed with M-16s and AK-47s. The leader of the video team (let’s call him Joe, played by Nantawat Arsirapojanakul aka Tor Nantawat: Lhob Pai Tang Ar-kad, Bullet Teen, Rang Pen Fai, Hunch) shoots back with an automatic pistol as he leaps for cover (someone has been watching too many John Woo movies, methinks).

Joe escapes, along with a moustachioed guy but to be honest there’s no point inventing a name for him because he took a hit and he dies shortly afterwards.

The bandits - whose leader wears a Ramones T-shirt! - make their way through the forest and suddenly come across a young woman who seems to appear from nowhere. It’s Su, dressed in white still though a more modern dress. They challenge her but are distracted when one of their number is bitten by a snake, and when they look back she’s gone. The bandits continue through the jungle but suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds of snakes which attack and kill several of them, including the Ramones fan.

Joe is hungry, tired and lost when he comes across Su sitting by the river. She takes him to the temple, which is well lit with flaming torches, and explains something that is probably important but I don’t speak Thai. At one point there’s an insert shot of her naked except for a twenty-foot snake strategically wrapped around her.

In the dark jungle - actually it’s extremely well-lit, considering that it’s the middle of the night - the bandits continue under a new leader, whom we’ll call Zack. He spots a snake in a tree ahead and shoots it. Back at the temple, Su feels a sharp pain in her arm. She goes out into the jungle to confront the bandits but they evidently now know who/what she is because they hold her with two magically glowing lassoes. But Joe appears and shoots through both ropes, makes the bandits drop their weapons, then helps a weakened Su back to the temple. He spots a patch of scales on her shoulder and she explains everything to him, including flashbacks to the prologue.

To be honest, the film goes downhill on the second disc and I had to keep reminding myself “Eighty-foot cobra, eighty-foot cobra...” to stay interested. Joe carries Su through the jungle to a road where the video team parked their vehicles - blimey, that’s easily found! He takes her home and tends to her and there are lengthy, soft-focus romantic scenes. With no subtitles, these are just boring.

Then who should turn up, in a very expensive red sports car, but Joe’s girlfriend Amanda (or whatever), evidently very rich and beautiful but not a truly nice person. Joe explains that he has found someone new and she slaps him and runs out crying - straight into Zack...

Another night-time scene of Su and Joe together by a lake is interrupted by the arrival of Zack and co., with Amanda and with plenty of guns. Jealous Amanda grabs a pistol and shoots at Su but Joe leaps forward to protect her and takes three bullets in the back. Su is mad now and does the eighty-foot cobra thing again - yay! - but rather than attacking Zack and Amanda she just grabs Joe in her coils and disappears into the lake.

Back at the temple, Joe is stretched out on the stones and Su is praying to a broken statue of an eight-armed god. Zack, Amanda and the bandits arrive and there is a tense stand-off. Unfortunately, rather than another giant cobra, we get the clichéed spectacle of Zack and Su blasting bolts of magical energy at each. She knocks out all the bandits and knocks down but doesn’t stun Amanda, but Zack has her cornered when - zap! - Joe comes to her rescue with his own bolts of magic.

That’s right, once again we have someone with no magical ability suddenly acquiring it in the final scene to save the day. It’s a shame the cobra didn’t reappear but as if to make up for this, Su turns Amanda into a snake which slithers away.

The first disc starts with unavoidable trailers for dreadful Vin Diesel action stinker A Man Apart, the latest one-word-will-do film from Nu Image Submarines (which evidently reuses sets and CGI models from Octopus) and Japanese scarecrow horror flick Takashi. After the film finishes, disc 2 has trailers for Australian train-surfing film The Pact and Hong Kong human-canine soul-swap comedy Every Dog Has His Date.

Nantawat Arsirapojanakul and Julaluck Kittiyarat seem to be quite big stars in Thailand (Julaluck has even released her own yoga video!) but I can find nothing on any of the other cast. If you know anything at all about Sushao Phongwilai, Lakkhet Wasikachart, Tasanawalai Ongartsittichai, Krt Suwanaphap, Yanwisat Bokert, Orawan Terrakirilin, Jinsujee Namthong, Arch Wangtaweephaiboon, Sakwich Timsan, Tanapon Teerasin or Thuanthong Teerawat Phokasap - please drop me a line!

Nor can I find anything else directed by Ch Ratchapol, though that certainly doesn't mean he hasn’t done anything else. The excellent cinematography is by Artit Hongrat with special effects by Michelle Thi and Jeab Ssi.

The Poison (original title Asirapis) is a mixed bag. A terrific first half is let down by a slow, talkie second half (though I’m sure it’s more interesting if you can understand what they’re talking about) and the ending, though it notches up the interest again, is an unimaginative hoary old ‘you zap me, I’ll zap you’ cliché. But that can’t take away the fact that the production values are top-notch, the effects are great, the direction is slick, the acting good, the cinematography superb and, most importantly, a woman turns into a giant cobra! The first eleven minutes alone are worth the price of admission and although this VCD was very good quality (almost no artefacting) I would recommend the DVD.

MJS rating: B+

Ngoo Keng Kong

Director: Charint Phromrangsi
Cast: Kwanphirom Lin, Withid Ladd
Year of release: 1995
Country: Thailand
Reviewed from: Thai VCD (Solar Marketing)

In the jungles of South East Asia, a group of hunters are trampling through the undergrowth in pursuit of a large snake, but a young village woman hides the serpent behind her basket and misdirects the hunters when they come looking for it. Returning home, she falls into a river and is saved from drowning - by the snake.

So begins this entry in the surprisingly extensive snake-woman sub-genre of Asian horror movies. Unfortunately the version I’ve got is in Thai and has no subtitles, so I will struggle through the plot as best I can.

The young woman (I don’t know any character names but we’ll call her Anna for convenience) lives in a hut in a village, where she takes in washing. One night she is visited at night by the great snake, which magically transforms into a handsome young man and makes love to her. Nine months later, heavily pregnant Anna is ostracised and criticised by her neighbours for being a single mother. She gives birth alone, in the jungle, in a torrential downpour. At first she fears that the baby is dead and covers it with broad leaves, but she hears a cry and takes her daughter home with her.

Several years on, we meet the daughter (let’s call her May) as a happy child playing with the other village kids, but something strange happens to her head. Unwrapping the girl’s headscarf, her playmates find that her hair is a mass of snakes and run screaming to their parents. Anna and May prepare to flee the village but before they can leave, a mob of angry villagers - carrying flaming torches in the grand tradition of horror movie angry mobs - surround their grass hut and set light to it. As the girl and her mother huddle together in terror, the heavens open and a sudden rainstorm douses the flames.

Anna and May move into a cave outside the village, and we jump ahead another ten years or so - May is now a gorgeous young woman with a propensity for sexy sarongs and leopard-skin bikinis (actually it looks more like civet-skin, but you get the picture).

Two scientists (let’s call them Fred and Joe) are out capturing lizards for study when Joe catches sight of May in the jungle and is instantly smitten. Later that night, Joe and Fred are attending some sort of festivity where an extravagantly dressed, jewel-draped entertainer sings... ‘Hava Nagila’! Joe spots May on the edge of the clearing and follows her, but is bitten by a snake in the jungle. May sucks out the poison and they’re in love.

At this point, the film turns into a completely different movie as we meet various gangsters, starting with a drugs deal which ends in a shoot-out between rival gangs. The movie gets very talky from here on in, so the plot is necessarily more vague.

Joe and May are now living in quite a nice house on the edge of town. Joe runs afoul of the gangsters and is beaten up but escapes. As he runs through the jungle, he is recaptured but May tries to save him. With Joe unconscious on the ground, one gangster attempts to rape May but she spits a small poisonous snake out of her mouth into his face. The other hoods run away in fear but one of them is brought down by a group of cobras which appear in their path.

It’s clear that the gangsters have a hold on the entire community, but the final straw is when three of them encounter Anna, washing clothes down at the river. She tries to run but is grabbed and has her head smashed on a rock. When May finds her mother’s body, she swears revenge using all the supernatural powers at her disposal.

Cue the finale, in which May transforms into a full-on snake woman, as depicted on the VCD inlay, with a full body-paint make-up job of serpentine scales. Her hair is again a mass of snakes, and there is another mass of coils around her hips to preserve the actress’ modesty. The effects budget doesn’t extend to making any of these snakes actually move, but it is still a pretty impressive sight. And in any case, there are plenty of real snakes on show.

May uses her mastery over snakes to summon dozens, maybe hundreds of the things, of all sizes and species. They swarm into the gangsters’ house and one by one the terrified bad guys fall prey to their attack. The villains are dead, Anna’s death is avenged, the local people are safe from the criminals - May and Joe live happily ever after.

Ngoo Keng Kong (aka Devil Medusa) is a surprisingly well-made film. Despite the rigidity of the snakes attached to May (as both adult and young girl) there’s enough of them that the appearance is pretty scary - though not as scary as the vast numbers of real snakes on show. All the animals - except those actually growing out of May - appear to be very real and very much alive, and all the actors interact with them on screen, especially the actress who plays Anna, who has to lie down and let a large python crawl all over her. There is very little by way of gore - mostly people are just seen screaming as a snake winds round them - and no sex or nudity.

The cinematography is extremely good, with rich blue shades in the many night time scenes, skilful photography of the fire attack on the grass hut, and other very credible uses of coloured lighting. The direction is slick, and the acting seems good. The only descents into comedy are ‘Hava Nagila’ (are these Jewish villagers?) and a speeded-up shot of Joe pulling his trousers on as he runs from a snake, following his first night with May.

So what is this film? What can we find out about it? Answers: dunno and not much. I thought at first that I might have bought the acclaimed 2001 Cambodian-Thai co-production Snaker, which is widely available on VCD. The original title of that film is Kuon Puos Keng Kang (‘The Snake King’s Child’) but I have also seen it on dealer’s lists as Ngu Geng Gong. However, I have tracked down some frame-grabs from Snaker [And in fact I’ve seen it since I wrote this review - MJS] and this very definitely isn’t it.

The story of the snake woman seems to be common currency throughout the region; The Illuminated Lantern website has some information on other Asian snake woman films.

Assuming that the various synopses/reviews which I’ve found are correct, I can definitely state that this film is not any of the following: The Snake Girl, Snake Girl Drops In, The Snake Woman, Nagin, Devi, Naag Shakti, Valetina, Hungry Snake Woman, The Snake Queen, Green Snake, Phantom of Snake, Sex Medusa, Love of the White Snake, Killer Snakes, Lady Master Snake/Snake Woman’s Marriage, Madame White Snake, Blood Snake Human Devil, Snake Devil, Snake Devil Woman, Snake Charmer, Calamity of Snake or The Ugetsu Story. The closest I’ve found so far is a 1970 Hong Kong/Philippines production called Devil Woman; the plot summary in Pete Tombs’ book Mondo Macabro has some similar elements to Ngoo Keng Kong - birth in a rainstorm, gang of toughs - but too many differences. So it’s not that either.

So it looks like I’ve got yet another First English Language Review. My disc is on the Solar label, catalogue number SZVCD 0027 - but there’s not one other word of English anywhere on the packaging or print. The disc itself is not great: the print is quite scratchy in some places and the image is very pixilated - even by VCD standards - in fast-moving scenes. Withid Ladd was also in the awful ghost movie Hunch.

Nevertheless, should you have a chance to see Ngoo Keng Kong, you should certainly take it. It’s a well-made film and an interesting example of the prolific Asian snake-woman subgenre.

MJS rating: B+

Addendum: After I first posted this review, the Marketing Department at Solar very kindly replied to my enquiry about this film, providing me with the names of the director and lead actors, and also a translation of the title: ‘ngoo’ means ‘snake’ and ‘keng kong’ is, I’m told, a species of snake.

Mystics in Bali

Director: H Tjut Djalil
Writer: Jimmy Atmaja
Producers: Abdul Muis Sofian, Hendry Katili, Sri Gunawan
Cast: Ilone Agathe Bastian, Yos Santo, Itje Trisnawati
Year of release: 1981
Country: Indonesia
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Mondo Macabro)

You can’t go wrong with Indonesian horror movies - they’re unashamedly bonkers. Mystics in Bali is allegedly one of the best - for some value of best - and is another terrific presentation from Mondo Macabro, purveyors of international weirdness to the discerning cinephile.

German tourist Ilone Agathe Bastian stars as American Kathy Keen. I’ll just repeat that in case you think you must have misread it - the female lead in this film is played not by an Indonesian actress, not by an American actress, not even by the director’s girlfriend but by a passing German tourist! This is the quality of film-making we’re dealing with.

Yos Santo - a skinny bloke with bushy hair and a small moustache - plays her Indonesian friend Mahendra. Kathy wants to write a book about black magic and Mahendra somehow introduces her to a master of the strongest, most primitive magic known to man - Leak (or Leyak). This turns out to be a mad old crone, all long fingernails, straggly hair and tatty clothes (not unlike the basic appearance of the evil sorcerer in Pemuja Cakar Iblis). The crone reappears in various guises, gradually getting younger, but the main thing she does is laugh. She positively screeches, over and over again (you can hear a mercifully brief clip of it at the end of the title sequence of the Mondo Macabro TV series, of which the episode about Indonesian movies is included here).

Our first touch of weirdness is when the crone shakes hands with Kathy and departs, leaving her detached hand which scuttles off when Kathy drops it to the ground. Over time Kathy learns more and more leyak magic from the ‘Leyak Queen’ and comes more and more under her power, to the consternation of Mahendra and his uncle, who once fought a leyak wizard (or something).

The young couple’s second meeting with the crone is extremely odd, and not just because we cut from one night scene to another with no indication that it’s 24 hours later. The witch is unseen this time, hiding in a bush, from which extends a slightly forked ten-foot tongue. “Have you brought the things I asked you to bring?” she asks, despite not having asked them to bring anything. And indeed they have - some small jewels and about eight pints of blood in glass bottles. No, it’s not explained...

Leyak magic gives its practitioners the ability to transmogrify themselves and we see this in action when the two women (Kathy having learned to screech with laughter properly) turn into pigs. This is achieved initially by crude bladder effects on their faces, then showing them running around wearing - I am not making this up - inflatable pig costumes. They then drop to all fours and, by the miracle of crap editing, become genuine live pigs.

That’s all well and good, but you can see crawling disembodied hands and people turned into pigs anytime (try a double bill of The Addams Family and Time Bandits). About halfway into the 80-minute feature we get what we’ve been waiting for, the image promised on the sleeve and the disc menu: Kathy’s disembodied floating head, complete with internal organs suspended beneath it.

The crone/witch/woman/thing wants Kathy’s head to do her evil work and sends it flying off through a mix of blue-screen work and a prop on a wire. Unwitting accomplice Kathy develops big vampire fangs when her noggin detaches and goes off to munch down on a baby as it’s being born - although the camera angle frankly makes this scene look more like lesbian muff-diving. Sorry, but it does.

Later we see the two women transform again - into snakes. Yes, Mystics in Bali is another snake-woman film, though it only just scrapes into that increasingly prolific genre because they’re not ‘snake-women’ per se, just women who can turn into animals, including on one occasion snakes. However, on the plus side the extras include an image of a poster for a movie called The Hungry Snake Woman (starring Indonesian horror legend Suzzanna) which clearly is a version of ‘The Snake King’s Daughter’. Another one to try and track down...

Mahendra’s uncle meanwhile knows that the best way to defeat the monster that Kathy has become is to prevent her guts-dangling head from reattaching to her body. This leads to the traditional climactic magical fight, yada yada yada.

It’s slow to start but once it gets going Mystics in Bali is top quality trash (there’s a bit of travelogue-style footage of Indonesian dancing early on to tempt tourists, though any promotional effort is rather undone by the suggestion that the country is home to cackling witches and flying vampire heads). The special effects are surprisingly sophisticated until one realises that what looks like an early 1970s movie was actually made in 1981. The best effect is in the final battle when the witch and the uncle fire animated bolts of energy at each other, tipped with grasping claws. Which is quite cool. (For a better, CGI-based flying vampire head effect, check out the 2002 Thai film Demonic Beauty.)

The dubbing is diabolical, with Mahendra in particular falling. Into the William. Shatner school of. Unnecessary pauses. Mondo Macabro’s print comes from the original negative and looks far better than the film deserves. It’s a terrific widescreen transfer with a bit of scratching, especially at reel ends, and the colour on some of the night scenes is a tad screwy, but that really doesn’t detract from the hoopla on screen.

As extras we get the aforementioned 25-minute documentary, which includes interviews with the director, special effects bloke El Badrun (who is clearly bonkers) and various producers and actors - including the living legend that is Barry Prima. There are clips from The Warrior, Satan’s Slave (no, not the Norman J Warren film!) and one of my all-time favourite pieces of Asian lunacy, The Devil’s Sword - directed by the aforementioned Mr Badrun! There’s an excellent and very informative essay on Mystics and its place in Indonesian exploitation cinema, and even an article on ‘how to become a leyak practitioner’ which reads like it has been copied from an old book, but unfortunately neither essay nor article are credited. There’s a complete filmography of director H Tjut Djalil (Lady Terminator) too.

Mystics in Bali is the on-screen title here but the film was apparently released as Balinese Mystic in Australia, a more likely location of potential tourists. Djalil does say in the documentary that the lead character is Australian and this is reinforced by a bit of poster copy reproduced on the IMDB, although the dialogue is unequivocal about Kathy being from the USA, which raises the possibility that the Aussie retitling might indicate a completely different dub. The other title sometimes given for the film is Leak, presumably used domestically. It is based on a novel called Leak Ngakak by local author Putra Mada.

Who would have thought that a film like this, in a terrific presentation and with an excellent bunch of extra goodies, would ever be for sale on the British high street? What an odd world we live in. Anyone with a fondness for Pacific Rim insanity should buy a copy of this straightaway. It’s a truly terrible film, but it is an absolute must-see. And if it sells enough, perhaps Mondo Macabro will release a similarly well-transferred and well-packaged version of The Devil’s Sword so that I can ditch my battered old ex-rental VHS copy.

MJS rating: A-

review originally posted 20th March 2005

Mega Snake

Director: Tibor Takacs
Writers: Alex J Volz, Robby Robinson
Producers: Boaz Davidson, David Varod, Bernd Ringswandl
Cast: Michael Shanks, Siri Baruc, Ben Cardinal
Country: USA/Germany
Year of release: 2007
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Revolver)

Isn’t it fabulous to see a good, old-fashioned movie poster which completely lies to the audience? Take a look at this promo artwork for Mega Snake (two words as on screen, although some promo material spells it as one) with a Godzilla-sized serpent smashing down buildings as jet fighters and attack helicopters pound it with missiles.

The actual title monster in Mega Snake does not knock down any buildings - in fact the whole film takes place not in a city but in a small town in rural Tennessee. There are no jet fighters or helicopters or indeed any kind of military or government intervention. And the snake definitely ain’t that big (nor does it have a cobra’s cowl, for that matter).

Nevertheless, this is a fun monster movie and the snake does grow much larger than even the biggest python or black mamba. I would put this into the subgenre of MSM - medium-sized monster - movies. Other MSMs would be things like the creatures in Garuda and The Host. Anything that’s abnormally or dangerously large but no bigger than a real animal such as a whale or a sauropod dinosaur: that’s an MSM. There you go, that’s another subgenre I’ve invented.

Filmed in Bulgaria, this US-German co-production directed by the ever-reliable Tibor Takacs for the good ol’ Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be rebranded as the CGI Monsters Channel, I believe - not that I’m complaining) opens with a prologue in the late 1980s as young Les Daniels (Itai Diakov, a child actor who played a zombie in JS Cardone’s Wicked Little Things) tries to get out of going to church.

This is because his parents are members of a fundamentalist sect that practices snake-handling. According to online man-in-a-pub Wikipedia, there are about forty churches in the Southern USA who still do this, passing around copperheads, rattlesnakes and other poisonous reptiles without (usually) being bitten. The preacher in the Daniels’ church reads out Luke 10:19, which is one of the essential texts: “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”

Les’ mother Dixie (Laura Giosh Markov: Day of the Dead remake), unnamed father and elder brother Duff (Ioan Karamfilov, who was also in Wicked Little Things as well as Anthony Hickox’s Submerged) are all believers but young Les is doubtful and when he is given a snake to hold, it lashes out and bites his father. Instead of seeking urgent medical attention, the assembled brethren declare that this is God’s will and Mr Daniels dies.

Twenty years later, Les and Duff are still living with their mother in the same house. Les is now played by Stargate SG-1 star Michael Shanks, Duff by John T Woods (Recently Deceased, Zombie Strippers) and their mom is still played by Laura Giosh Markov (in pretty convincing old-age make-up). Les is now a paramedic, partnered with sassy blonde Fay (Israeli actress Michal Yannai who was in Takacs’ squid-flick Kraken) and Duff appears to be generally unemployed. The upshot of the events in the prologue is supposedly that Les now has a fear of snakes but although this is mentioned a couple of times (“He’s afraid of commitment, afraid of snakes, afraid of everything!”) there’s absolutely no evidence of it, not even when his brother brings a snake home or when he starts investigating a damn great snake. Nor is there any evidence of regret at having inadvertently caused his father’s death. Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence of bitterness towards his family who evidently still like a spot of the old snake-handling of a Sunday morning. (Despite this, the Sci-Fi Channel publicity quoted Shanks as saying, “My character has been scarred for life ever since from witnessing this and has a deathly fear of snakes.”)

Duff’s church duties apparently involve finding new snakes so he seeks out Native American tattoo artist Screaming Hawk (Cree actor Ben Cardinal: Magic in the Water) who has a back-of-the-shop sideline as a reptile-dealer. Among the limbless beasties on offer is a small snake, swimming in a sealed jar of water, which Screaming Hawk says is an Unteka. Or possibly the Unteka. There’s a silly script snafu here where the white guy asks why he has never heard of this snake and the snake dealer says that it’s because his people killed them all except this one. But this story is later repeated as ‘the Unteka killed a whole bunch of Indians’ which I suppose could also be true but isn’t what Screaming Hawk said. Anyway, despite being warned to leave the Unteka alone, Duff can’t resist half-inching it when Screaming Hawk is distracted by a customer in the tattoo parlour.

Back home, the jar gets knocked to the floor and smashes – and Les is sure he sees the snake magically grow from a few inches to a couple of feet before Duff captures it in a Tupperware container. That night, a curious kitten investigates the container too closely and pays the price. It won’t be the last cute animal to die in this movie which is actually quite gleefully nasty in places.

Against all this is the human story. Les is dating Erin (Siri Baruc: Spliced, Unholy, The Glass Trap) who is a ‘Ranger’ - some sort of law enforcement, I don’t know - and wants to settle down. A lovers’ tiff leads to the couple drinking separately in a bar: Les with Fay (they spend the night together but nothing happens) and Erin with another ranger, vain arsehole ‘Big Bo’ (Todd Jensen: Copperhead, Sabretooth, Project Shadowchaser II and IV, Cyborg Cop - whom I met on the set of Rampage/Breeders). From the moment he appears, the audience is rooting for Big Bo to get his come-uppance and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that he eventually does.

The next morning Duff finds the escaped snake - now more distinctly snake-sized - and deposits it in a rabbit hutch (snake hutch?), unaware that it has slaughtered not only all the family’s chickens but also his mother whose bloody remains are in the henhouse. To be honest, around this point it becomes quite difficult to follow the precise order of events because the movie has a somewhat lax attitude towards the concepts of night and day. There’s nothing as egregiously bad as the night-time broad daylight scene in Haunted Prison but there are sequences which seem to take place at the same time in different time zones. It certainly looks like Dixie goes out to feed the chickens (in daylight) while Duff and Les are drinking and arguing in a bar in town (at night). Or something.

Some of the night/day and day/night scene changes seem to be there to indicate the passage of time but if they are all taken that way then the events of a couple of days actually take place over about a week. It’s not enough to make the film unenjoyable but it is distracting.

Long story short, the snake keeps growing and people start disappearing, mostly folk that we don’t know. A family out camping by the lake are gobbled up and their car later discovered, complete with smashed windows, loads of blood and huge, parallel fang-scratches on the paintwork but Bo dismisses Erin’s theory that a giant snake must be to blame. (The father is Terry Winkless who was apparently director of various Power Rangers episodes, writer of The Howling and the actor inside one of the Banana Splits costumes! The mother is Andrea Enright who appeared with Winkless as a pair of deputies in Lake Placid 2.)

As Bo and Erin are studying the damaged car, a fat chap in a fancy vehicle turns up who is obviously the mayor. We know this because (a) fat guys in fancy cars in these films are always the mayor, (b) Bo calls him ‘Mayor’ right at the end of the scene and (c) in the grand tradition of not closing the beaches, he wants the next day’s country fair to go ahead. That’s the first we’ve heard of a country fair but then it’s the first (and last) we see of the mayor who is credited as ‘Artimus’ on screen although that name is never mentioned (he is played by Michael McCoy, a veteran of both Lake Placid 2 and Wicked Little Things).

At one stage Bo arrests Les for the murder of his family but Erin springs him from gaol, having discovered a giant snakeskin that the creature has shed in the woods. This is left on the police station doorstep so Bo sets out with two previously unseen rangers who really should have been looped as their dialogue is so wooden that they might well have learned it phonetically.

It all culminates with the now-giant snake attacking the fairground. There is some attempt to exploit this novel scenario, most successfully with a roller-coaster full of decapitated bodies (although it’s not clear how the snake managed to bite so many heads off as the car whizzed around). The snake also attacks the dodgems and a kiddie roller-coaster. I had hopes, as it slithered onto the track, that the smily caterpillar cars would come round and then, one circuit later, be replaced by the similar-diameter serpent, but if this was ever planned it’s not in the finished movie.

Les and Erin have by now teamed up with Screaming Hawk to stop the monster and Les has to understand the meaning of the three warnings which apply to the Unteka in a derivative but unnecessary spin on Gremlins. These are: Never let it out of the jar (well, duh!); never let it eat anything living; and ‘never fear the heart of the serpent’. This last one becomes rather literal in the admittedly quite exciting - if frankly rather silly - climax.

Sci-Fi Channel creature features are often fairly formulaic - and Mega Snake is no exception. But what it does, it does pretty well. There’s nothing really bad about it and a few bits are actually good, plus the problematic stuff - like the main character’s claimed but non-existent phobia of snakes - are no great hindrance to enjoyment. Tibor Takacs can probably direct these things in his sleep now, having helmed Mansquito, Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, The Black Hole, Ice Spiders and this film all within a two-year period. But that’s the thing about Sci-Fi. They like reliable film-makers who can deliver the goods on budget, on schedule and to an acceptable level of excitement.

Takacs’ other films include Killer Rats, the Andy Hurst-scripted Earthquake and The Gate I and II. He also, somewhat oddly, directed the feature-length pilot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, some episodes of the TV series and the spin-off TV movie Sabrina Goes to Rome. But then, I always maintained that Sabrina was actually a much better show than it was generally given credit for. Other TV work includes The Outer Limits, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven and Earth: Final Conflict.

The cast also includes Nick Harvey and Harry Anichkin as two old guys who live in adjacent houses in the middle of the woods and set out to hunt the snake using a home-made flame-thrower. There’s probably a gay subtext in these two characters if you look hard enough. Both actors have another giant snake film on their CV: Anichkin was in Boa vs Python (also Octopus 2, Shark Attack 3 and Alien Hunter) while Harvey was in Copperhead - and, interestingly, now runs a talent agency together with Todd Jensen.

Charles Campbell, who plays the young priest in the prologue, is credited as Charles ‘Chuck’ Campbell and is presumably there as a sort of two-for-one deal for the Stargate fans as he plays the technician Chuck in Stargate Atlantis. Neither Alex J Volz nor Robby Robinson has any other produced script credit that I can locate: Volz may be the German advertising guru Alexander Volz. Or possibly not.

Mega Snake is a Nu Image production, from the people who brought us Octopus, Spiders, Shark Attack, Crocodile and assorted unconnected sequels to same. In practice this means that Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort were executive producers while producer Boaz Davidson came up with the story. All three gentlemen are on my interview wants list and have been for some time. However, despite opening with the Nu Image logo, the actual copyright lies with Taxer GmbH, a German company presumably run by gloriously named producer Bernd Ringswandl and his even more marvellously named wife, Margarete Taxer-Ringswandl, credited here as ‘co-executive producer’. David Varod, another Nu Image dude, is the other producer while Ewerhard Ed Engels is the other exec.prod. Boy, those Germans sure have great names!

The cinematographer is Emil Topuzov (Wicked Little Things, Mansquito, Shark Zone) and Takacs’ regular editor Ellen Fine handled the Avid. The music is by Guy Zerafa (Replicant, Killer Rats, Gladiator Cop) and Dave Klotz (Rats, Eyeborgs) who weirdly doesn't seem to be credited on this disc. Ashley Miller, credited as Music Supervisor, has a string of credits including Shark Zone, Raging Sharks, Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy, Shark Attack 3 and even some films that aren’t about sharks. Production designer Carlos Da Silva, like many of the crew, worked on Wicked Little Things, the Day of the Dead remake and assorted other Tibor Takacs pictures.

But the thing that sells a Sci-Fi Channel creature feature is of course the creature and it must be said that this one’s pretty good (the absence of fur and limbs must have made things somewhat easier). Scott Coulter of Worldwide FX was the Visual Effects Producer and he has a string of credits going back twenty years to the likes of Robot Holocaust and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. He spent ten years or so doing physical effects on pictures such as Arena, 976-EVIL II, The Mangler, Cellar Dweller, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, then segued into digital effects on the likes of The Prophecy, Spiders I and II, Crocodile 2, Alien Lockdown, The Snake King, AI Assault and John Carl Buechler’s version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

When it’s small, Coulter’s CGI snake is thoroughly believable. When it grows huge, slightly less so merely because of the speed with which it moves. However there are some great shots of it interacting with people and I think it’s probably only the very final shot which uses a physical section of snake.

There is one final oddity to note about Mega Snake. There is a scene at the fairground where a whole bunch of kids get excited because a guy in a superhero costume comes on stage to warn them about the dangers of electricity. When the giant snake appears, the kids run screaming and the superhero guy tries to fend it off with a microphone stand.

Now, I had to do a bit of Googling to find out what was going on here. It seems that the Sci-Fi Channel, in between CGI monster movies, had its own reality TV series called Who Wants to be a Superhero?, presented by none other than Smilin’ Stan Lee himself. Members of the American public entered this X-Factor-meets-X-Men show by designing and making their own costumes, inventing a cool name and dreaming up what their superpowers could be, then competing in some sort of contests which saw one person eliminated each week by popular vote.

The winner was a young chap named Matthew Atherton aka ‘Feedback’ and although I used the phrase ‘members of the American public’ in the preceding paragraph, he was in fact a professional actor who had already had guest roles in episodes of NCIS and Malcolm in the Middle. I’m sure all the other contestants were actors too. The people who compete in American Idol or The X-Factor or any of these shows are never just talented amateurs who sing in the shower, they’re always minor league pros.

So anyway, part of the prize was that the winning superhero would get to appear in an original movie on the Sci-Fi Channel - and here it is. However, it would seem that Feedback and his fans are rather disappointed by Matthew Atherton’s brief cameo as a man dressed as a superhero and were, presumably, expecting a full-blown Feedback: The Movie. I don’t know the whys and wherefores or the ins and outs here but I would certainly be happy to be menaced by a giant snake in a Tibor Takacs film. I mean, come on: how cool is that?

In the subgenre of medium-sized monster giant snake films, Mega Snake is pretty respectable and I feel the urge to give it plaudits for its outrageously deceitful publicity campaign.

MJS rating: B+

review originally posted 14th March 2008

Mega Python vs Gatoroid

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.