SILENT PREDATORS
Because RATTLEsnakes are so silent

  How can it be that a movie called Silent Predators not only has RATTLEsnakes for villains, but any number of scenes where people say "Did you hear that?"

Of the five writers (including one John Carpenter, to whose name I reacted with such shock that I forgot to check who the director was) credited for teleplay and story, not one of them seems to actually know anything about rattlesnakes.  Oh, maybe one of them was brought in and told just what was nonsense about the snakes in the film ("...but you get around that by making them, like, HYBRID rattlesnakes"), but c'mon, reason it all out, and I still can't imagine a rattlesnake that will rattle its tail to warn you as it races at you from fifty feet away.

Twenty years in the past in southern California, a stranded motorist hitches a ride from the driver of a flatbed truck.  And there's a big crate on the back that says "VENOMOUS REPTILE".  Maybe the back of a flatbed truck isn't the best way to move something like this.  Anyways, they crash (natch), the crate breaks, and twenty years later when the escaped tropical rattler has successfully made himself a known presence in the local rattlesnake gene pool, an under-construction community comes under siege by: killer squirrels.  (okay, they're not squirrels)

Elapsed time before a young couple wanders into the woods so one of them can get chomped?  Eight minutes.  Does this have a new-to-town public-service chief who wants to rock the boat and save the community but the local bigwigs keep stymieing his efforts?  Duh.  Lots of shots of rattlesnakes taking a chomp right at the camera?  Yup.

Harry "Perseus" Hamlin plays the new fire chief, Jack Scalia, the housing developer, and Shannon Sturges (and an assortment of tight-fitting shirts)  - who reacts to suggestions that she's a frightened woman in the same way that Marty McFly reacted to being called "chicken" - plays the greedy developer's assistant.  (how much do you want to bet she'll raise an eyebrow when it's suggested she consult with a herpetologist?)

These are quite the rattlesnakes.  Real rattlesnake bites are rarely fatal - here, they'll kill you every time, within about 10 seconds, too.  Real rattlesnakes rattle to warn off enemies.  It's they're way of saying "Fuck off, you're on my turf, be-otch!" Here, they rattle, not to warn you off, but...I don't really know why, since they're so aggressive they'll chase you down from half a block away.  Real rattlesnakes look like rattlesnakes.  These ones look suspiciously like boa constrictors and/or pythons about half the time; at any rate, they REALLY don't look like rattlers.  (and a king snake in this movie manages to kill a rattler way too big for it to eat.  I don't want to look like a fool when some guy out there says that this does happen, but...would a constrictor really bother killing an animal it doesn't intend to eat?  I can see a poisonous snake doing this - one bite and its work is done.  But for a constrictor, this seems like an awful lot of work.)  I could go on all day.  Suffice it to say, these hybrid rattlesnakes are hybrid enough to not really be rattlesnakes anymore.

Guys, I'll be honest, snakes scare the shit out of me (don't know why; loved 'em 'til I was about 19), and every time one was on screen for the first hour or so, I had to pull my feet up onto the chair so they wouldn't be bitten by anything underneath it.  But I guess I got kinda desensitized after a while, and by the time the snake-heavy climax came (evoking, of all films, Dante's Peak), I found myself pretty much bored silly.

I was kind of hoping for some giant snakes - or maybe just one, which they'd find in the lair, but no - this movie's idea of a giant snake is seven feet long, big for a rattlesnake, but not giant enough for my tastes.  (in fact, when one of these dead seven-foot snakes is picked up by its neck and held at arms length by one of these characters, it's obviously only about four feet long)

Don't even get me started on the "snake-o-vision" POV shots, in which everything is red, which I guess is the director's best jab at telling us that rattlesnakes, being pit vipers, sense heat.  It's all pretty much what you'd expect from a made-for-TV time-waster about killer rattlesnakes. Directed (thank you, IMDb) by perennial made-for-TV time-waster guy Noel Nosseck. 

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