Snakes on a Plane
I've been constantly told that I missed out on the "Snakes on a Plane" experience because I didn't see the movie in a packed theatre. Fine, there may be some truth to that. Comedy movies always seem funnier in a large audience. Slasher movies too, I find better in the company of strangers. But the fact is, I didn't see Snakes on a Plane when it was in the cinema. So all I can offer you is my cold analysis and review from watching in on DVD (with an audience though). Snakes on a Plane starts off with a very slow revelation of what is a needless plot. I mean the title of the film is the god damn "motherfucking" plot. For those keeping track though, Samuel L. Jackson is a cop on a red-eye flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles to make sure that an eyewitness can testify aganist a criminal mob boss. We meet the wafer thin characters on board the doomed aircraft. The air hostess on her last flight, the rapper, the pretty girl with a dog, two children flying by themselves. Great. That's all we know these people as, why should we give a shit if they get eaten? No background and no personalities = audience disinterest. Why do horror movies continuously miss the boat on such a simple fact? There in lies one of the big problems of the movie's script. The Snakes are the main character, we even get "Snake vision". Please, give me a break. This film is made by someone who just doesn't have any idea of what the word "suspense" means. After the first time a snake bites at someone's sexual genitals, that's fine the joke is over. But they go to that well again, and again and again. Where is the creativity in that? The worst thing about the film is not how stupid and rancid it is but how rather tedious the movie becomes. It bored the hell out of me. It's only got a running time of 105 minutes but around the 40 minute mark I thought the film had blown it's gun. It had nowhere else to go. The immortal line from Samuel L. Jackson felt like a desperation plea to add drama to the flick, but it fell flat on it's face. Snakes on a Plane is a real missed opportunity. Handled by a veteran horror director (probably an Asian one), we could have been treated to a horror movie that's not winking at the audience all of the way through. It's a hybrid of a comedy/horror and it feels like it's lacking in both. The Asian movie The Host, seems to have got the blend between the two just right (not that I've seen it yet, but from trailers, word of mouth, etc.). Slither (review here) I saw a few weeks back, put's this movie to shame. We could have seem some scary shit. Snakes that actually look and feel real rather than the overloaded CGI crap we were privy to. This movie looked terrible on the small screen, I hate to think what the CGI would look like on the big screen. SOAP isn't going to be rememered for how good a film it is, or even because it's "so bad that's it's good" but because of it's over fuelled Internet marketing campaign. Us bloggers, should be given a directorial credit for this film. We told him what to shoot, we demanded that Sam say that "line". We created this monster of a movie, but by not going to see it, we killed off any chance of it being anything more than a distant memory. rating: 2
As a B-Movie horror/thriller it's not up to the standard of say Slither, The Host or Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson's early movies. If it wasn't for the Internet buzz over the film's title and Samuel L. Jackson's line, I wonder if this would have even made theatres.