Mega Snake

26Nov07

All right. Let’s just go ahead and get this out there. If you live in a small rural town, and you’re planning some big event, call it the hell off when someone comes to you with a warning about some crazy giant ferocious animal. For real. Just cancel it.

We begin this story with a child who’s psychologically traumatized after seeing his father, the preacher, die as a result of one of those freaky snake-handling church services. Fast forward 20 years, and we see the result of this trauma - our guy’s still living at home with his mama, working as a paramedic. He’s also having some girlfriend trouble, on account of the whole “still living with his mama” thing. His brother has taken up the family business of procuring dangerous reptiles for religious use. Apparently, his religion encourages playing with snakes but has no trouble with theft, because he steals a mysterious snake from the local Native American stereotype dude.

Before you know it, the snake escapes. It devours the family cat and blue-screens its way out the door and over to the henhouse. Things obviously just get worse from there. Our hero is so distracted by his girlfriend trouble that he doesn’t notice when he gets home that the dog, the cat, all the chickens and his mother are missing. But when he sees blood all over the living room, a light bulb goes on in his fraidy-cat head and he calls in the po-lice.

EMS-hero’s girlfriend is a park ranger and, coincidentally, also a Ph.D. in zoology, which I guess qualifies her as the foxxy scientist doctor lady for Mega Snake. Help is enlisted from the Deliverance Brothers, who fashion a snake-killing apparatus from a propane tank and various pieces from their ramshackle abodes out in the woods. But nothing can stop the snake from showing up at the county fair. Dr. ParkRanger tried to warn the mayor and have them call it off, but of course no one listened to her. At the fair, there are kids getting high, and one couple making out in the woods. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what happened to them.

The trick to killing the snake is that you have to not be afraid of it, according to Mr. NativeAmericanStereotype. Which is an issue for EMS-hero, what with his snake-related childhood trauma. But of course, he overcomes in the name of love. If you like the blood & guts, you’re in for a treat. There are several high-quality decapitation scenes, as well as a wicked awesome head explosion. Bonus points for the sheer number of different fakety-fake rural/mountain/southern accents, which are all over the place in this film. If King Cobra is all rented at the Blockbuster, this one would be an acceptable substitution.

As a post script, I’d like to add that there were no tall buildings or jet fighters in this movie, so the photo shown here might be a bit misleading. But there was the giant badass killer snake, much like this one.

Filed under: Creature Features   |