SnakeMan (2005)

Expected more

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The Snake King, or Snakeman as it's more commonly known, starts as New York based pharmaceutical company GenTech announces in a press conference that during a recent expedition in the Amazon they discovered a corpse of a man which when analysed showed he died at the age of 300. Company scientists Dr. Rick Gordon (Larry Day) & Dr. Susan Elters (Jayne Heitmeyer) are going to lead another expedition into the Amazon to finds his tribe & discover the secret of living for 300 years, what could possibly go wrong? Well, for a start their helicopter is struck by lightening & crash lands in the middle of the Amazon, then Rick turns out to be a complete d*ck & to top it off a huge five headed snake wants to eat them all. Can their local guide Matt (Stephen Baldwin) lead them to safety & is finding the secret to eternal life really worth being eaten by a huge five headed snake for?This made-for-TV Canadian American co-production was written & directed by Allan A. Goldstein & is yet another Nu Image produced creature feature flick complete with all the clichés that these films seem determined to include. The script takes itself very seriously & is basically pretty much the same sort of thing as Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) with it's plot about a youth potion in the Amazon guarded by a snake, in this case a ridiculous looking one of the giant five headed variety. Lets go through the clichés which Nu Image insist on having in their creature features, good guys including a beautiful female scientist & a rugged hero type who end up falling in love, the antagonistic bad guys who want something the creature is protecting/in the way of, the disposable character's who don't say anything & have no opinions on anything because they are there to get eaten, the supposedly dramatic moralistic ending which will leave most viewers wiping away the tears of either laughter or boredom, the single isolated location to keep production costs down & an abundance of awful CGI computer effects. Yep, they're all here present & correct. Unfortunately Snake King is even more lame than a lot of other Nu Image 'classics' like Cyborg Cop (1993), Shark Attack (1999), their best film to date Spiders (2000), Crocodile (2000), Octopus (2000), Mansquito (2005) & a plethora of sequels & other killer Shark flicks, I mean most of the above are pretty bad films but a lot of them at least had fun elements, unintentionally hilarious moments & a sense no one was taking things too seriously but The Snake Kingis just a dull, boring, unoriginal mess of a film that isn't even good for any laughs & doesn't have any good looking babes in it either. At least the five headed snake survives at the end & gets to eat lots of humans but it's still a stinker.Director Goldstein doesn't do anything special here, the pace is slack, the plot is dumb, the editing is awful & the special effects are terrible. The CGI computer effects look awful, unless you have literally million's to spend on them GCI always ends up looking worse than your average Saturady morning cartoon with badly animated monsters that look stupid. The wonderful Ray Harryausen stop-motion animated seven headed Hydra from Jason and the Argonauts (1963) looks 100 times better & more realistic than the five headed snake here. There's a few gory bit here, there's some severed arms, people are bitten in half & there's a brief scene when someone has their stomach sliced open & their guts spill out.With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 the filmmakers were obviously working on a tight budget & it's a surprise they actually managed to shoot the thing on location in Brazil. Awful looking five headed snakes & helicopter crashes apart it's reasonably well made but it's bland & forgettable without an ounce of style. The acting here is bad & Stephen Baldwin is the token 'celebrity' actor who obviously needed rent money & a free holiday in South America.The Snake King is a pretty awful creature feature which offers nothing new over the countless killer Shark, Octopus, Insect, Lizard & Arachnid type films which seem to be everywhere & it doesn't even any genuine unintentional laughs either. Definitely not recommended, I'm not sure why they keep making these sorts of films other than there are people out there who like them & to satisfy demand Nu Image's next giant killer snake flick seems to be called MegaSnake (2007) & premiers in July apparently...

This movie is rubbish, not the worse i have seem so far, the special effects are a shocker, and very poor. I love these jungle movies, were they suppose to be in thick jungle, were no-one human been for thousands of years, but there is well design tracks and path-ways. I do agree this movie is the poor mans Anaconda, with villains, and the hero who saves the day. I notice on the it says on the cover, Anaconda meets Indiana Jones, well Stephen Baldwin is no Indiana Jones, however this movie does tried to rip off the raiders of the lost art, but fails and is falls short of this. There is no boobs and sex in this movie, but some hot native girls who are obviously models with their boob jobs. Native girls in the Amazon with boob jobs, thats what it is. This movie is not bad, and if you have a bored Saturday afternoon, it wouldn't hurt watching this low budget, poorly acted so called jungle action movie.

This was one hell of a stinker. Comparing this to an early Dr Who episode from 1960's Who had the worse scrip: The Snake King Who had the worse dialog: The Snake King Who had the worse acting: The Snake King Who was more predictable: The Snake King Who had the most fake special effects: The Snake King (This is going against cardboard cutouts, men in wetsuits, and obvious miniatures.) The Snake King did have one advantage over the Dr Who episode it was in colour.It does have a good drinking game if you have a drink every bad line or when a henchman gets killed you are more likely to pass-out from alcoholic poisoning than pass halfway through the movie.

After a group of researchers discovers a mummy in the Amazon who proves to have lived to an age of at least 300--he had some physiological peculiarities--a "big, evil corporation" sends a handful of scientists back to Amazonia to search for a tribe of Methulselahs. They end up with Stephen Baldwin as a guide, which is good news if you like the Baldwins (I do) but probably a reason to avoid the film otherwise, and they end up discovering a tribe associated with a multi-headed "snake god", which really exists (in the film) and which enjoys eating people after it dismembers them.My rating for this film is something of an average. Being in the mood for some abecedarianism, I gave Snake King an A for aeffort when it comes to gore (if I can be allowed to spell "effort" like "aesthetics"; maybe I should give it an "A for attitude" instead), a B for Baldwin, a C for the clichés, a D for da story, and an F for most of the other aspects, like the cgi, the native costumes and makeup, the lack of suspense, and so on. That averaged out to a D for me, or a 6.The biggest problem is that the story just isn't that interesting, and director Allan A. Goldstein doesn't seem to mind. Although the discovery and search for the exact source of a practical, scientific "fountain of youth" could have promise, what we get instead is a very pedestrian film that couldn't care less if every dramatic situation is by the numbers. In fact, the editing (both the literal film editing and the "flow" or construction of the script) is so bad that the clichés were probably welcomed--they help viewers fill the missing exposition in for themselves.But the final result is that Snake King is almost entirely devoid of suspense. For most of the characters, you just do not care what happens to them. Most you want to die in the jaws of the snake--and soon--so the film can end already, before it gets any worse. Eventually it gets so bad that the climax, and particularly the dénouement, are pretty hilarious. There is a romance angle in the last few moments that comes out of nowhere. It's even funnier because characters stop to make googly eyes and kiss while ignoring the fact that one of them may be bleeding to death. But most of the film isn't "so bad it's good", whether Goldstein may have been shooting for that or not. Most of it is just bad.For a sci-fi channel film, there is little sci in this sci-fi (which arguably, is not unusual). The actual goal is merely to have a film showing a cgi snake mauling explorers 10 Little Indians style, and the real motivation for setting the film in Amazonia is to avoid the cost of building sets. Since the film takes place in the jungle, and some of the crew must be big Predator (1987) fans, they figure what better opportunity to give our antagonist Predator vision (minus the computer displays). Like everything else, this effect has all the impact of a greased cotton ball smashing through steel.Even though the mauling scenes look more like an early 1990s video game, I have to give the filmmakers credit for trying to amp up that aspect. There is no shortage of severed limbs, decapitations, or bodies cut in half. There could have been a bit more blood in the film for my tastes (I'm no champion of bloodless horror, although I don't necessarily mind it). But the more visceral aspect of the film was nice, especially for a made for television film.Although most of the cast wasn't much to speak of--some of them are obviously present just as snake food--I like Stephen Baldwin, as I like all of the Baldwin brothers. I'm a fan of camp. No matter what the Baldwin brothers do, they can't help but radiate camp. My only complaint is that Baldwin should have had an even bigger part. But the prominent "evil scientist", played by Larry Day, was just as fun to hate as Baldwin was fun to watch being campy.Of course, it's difficult to buy any character as being the kind of person who would have the job or social role that they have in the film, including the natives, who have some fairly ridiculous makeup and costumes on (in the main tribe, all of the women are wearing bikinis for some odd reason). There was also a subplot about other explorers, including one who adopts a tribal way of life (played by Greg Evigan). The subplot is never explored/explained very well, so those characters remain more of a mystery.If you dislike predictability, you should steer far clear from this film. In addition to the 10 Little Indians and monster movie clichés (you just know what kind of big confrontation there will be in the climax, and so on), there are the typical "big, evil corporation" clichés. Given the basic elements, most IMDb users could probably construct the rest of the script for themselves.Still, I can't say that I had no fun watching Snake King, and I'd even consider picking up the DVD if I could get it for less than, say, $2. So it isn't a complete failure, but it's awfully close.