First things first, the movie’s display case promises us “100 Passengers, 3000 Venomous Vipers” while it’s less ambitious trailer instead offers us only 1000 of the legless reptiles… and spells “Venemous” wrong, obviously. Numbers are always exaggerated in these cases either way, so let’s see if we can’t get a more accurate tally when this is over. As for the movie’s creative talent, this is the first project for the Mallachi Brothers, whom I’m imaging to be the children of Nazi war criminals trying to hide out in the bad movie counter culture under assumed names. The cast holds absolutely no promise and is heralded by a guy named Alby Castro (his first credited job that doesn’t consist of being a waiter on a soap opera or doing the voice of a wrestler in a video game) and a chick named Julia Ruiz, whose imdb.com profile has far too many pictures on it (3) for a woman who’s never worked in the entertainment business before. Well, maybe the writer, Eric Forsberg, will have the magic to pull this, his 10th working credit, from the void of the crapper… not that any of his past works give me reason to believe this outlandish and desperate claim of mine. Things don’t look good for your friendly neighborhood Death God kiddies.

The center of the movies is a South American couple. Alma (Ruiz) was cursed by her family when she refused to marry a rich man to up their lack-of-social-status from “face down in the gutter” to “face down in a higher class of gutter”, opting instead to run away with her beloved Brujo (Castro… Alby, not Fidel). The curse, given to her by her own family mind you, gradually turns the young lady’s internal organs into snakes and Brujo has to get her to his medicine man uncle in Los Angeles to restore her before the curse kills her… or worse. To make sure she’s still in one piece when/if they make it to the so-called city of angels, Brujo collects the serpents in mason jars and shotguns ‘em from his magical dope stash to keep them nice and stoned and complacent for the trip. Unable to get the help they need from a badly acted Texan hick, once in los Estados Unidos (that’s 3 years of Espanol class right there mi amigos) the two hobo their way onto a passenger train from the lone star state heading to the land of the “beautiful” people, where they just so happen to bump into a childhood friend of Alma’s named Miguel. It’s the unruly Mexican hooligans (and by “Mexican” I mean that they’re unwashed and speak with a bad stereotype accent reminiscent of a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon) that have also stowed aboard the train that are going to lead this already unsteady cinematic balancing act plummeting into the netless tent floor below.

Though the only important part of the entire movie is what goes on with Al’ and ‘Jo, we’re forced to sit through a cast of fodder and all of their crap as well, just so we can pad the movie and make sure it tops out at a feature length 90 minutes. Their names don’t matter and their roles are just as generic, but for those curious enough to read through the remainder of this paragraph we get a quartet of surfer chodes, a mother-father-daughter trio, the conductor, the crack smoking engineer, a salesman, a divorced woman, a bartender, a guy sitting at said bar, two young women looking for a new start, a lecherous ex-drug agent with a taste for young women looking for new starts and a current law enforcement agent with a taste for lecherous ex-drug agents with a taste for young women looking for new starts… Oh yeah, and more of those “Mexican” hoodlums. Alma’s curse is apparently contagious too, so these people serve as little more than breeding grounds for the “guts into snakes” plague, spreading it along like a Romero zombie epidemic.

And that’s pretty much how the rest of the so-called movie goes. The train goes ooc (out-of-control), the snakes gets bigger in both size and number, and something strange and (somewhat) unexpected happens to Al’ that almost makes the last ten minutes of the movie worth watching… think crazy Lady Marsh from Lair of the White Worm only with bad CGI and a fucking weak-ass deus ex machina finale. And just when shit was looking up, that’s when the bloated bird of unhappiness lets the gritty shitty rip from the heavens on a bee-line to your unprotected ocular orbs.

Within the first 12 minutes you’re tied down and required to suffer through no less than 4 wholly terrible acting jobs, an unconvincing “good ol’ boy” moron, the impossibly coincidental appearance of the mandatory “childhood friend” character, a fire that, despite being stomped out thoroughly, somehow continues to illuminate the scene for several minutes following, and a handful of garter snakes and corn snakes that somehow manage to put giant bite marks into their victims and pull off an unconvincing audio impression of a rattlesnake at the same time… if I thought these were all in any way intentional in there shittitude I’d say it was brilliant, but as they stand, I started to hyperventilate from all the groaning, whimpering and other sounds of general frustration ripping from my lungs. One of my biggest rectal barbs of contention? Despite being from South America and speaking nothing but badly scripted Spanish for the first 20 minutes of the movie, both Al’ and ‘Jo seem content to jump back and forth between that and perfect English for the remainder of the movie, never quite throwing their proverbial hat into one ring or the other, whether the two are talking with someone or alone… I’m starting to feel dizzy and nauseous just thinking about it… This would become the theme for the remainder of the movie… up until those last 9 or 10 minutes.

I was confident that Snakes On A Train would be my first deserving recipient of the feared Mr. Yuck grade in quite some time. It was truly running neck and neck with crap like Killer Workout and Demonicus there for a while and I was already playing through the righteous bashing I was going to give it today as a result… then this happens and my opinion, though in no way doing a complete 180 mind you, is dulled enough to deny this movie a seat next to Master of Evil swimming in a pool of stomach acids and regurgitated baby feces. As far as the obvious comparison that has to be made, though this movie gets it’s lunch money stolen from it repeatedly by Snakes On A Plane in the production and talent departments, I have to say that Train whips out a surprising sucker punch or two as far as the story and the ending. It’s not enough that Train takes the heavyweight championship of the universe in regards to movies about snakes on commercial transportation, but it comes off as more of a charming underdog when it’s all over rather than the delusional legless feeb with the American flag shorts and big mouth that it came to the fight as.

And where does the final tally end up in our “100 passengers” and “1000/3000 snakes” cast? I count no more than maybe 20 or so passengers on this train (and this includes the non-passenger characters like the bartender, engineer and conductor) and no more than maybe 100 or so snakes, real or computer born. Ah, another case of blatant advertisement misdirection. Don’t you love it? Speaking of which, it’s time for Sign of a Fuck-Awful Movie #26: if there’s a quote on the box that says something like “Grotesque, creepy. Don’t plan on sleeping for days!”, but doesn’t include a noted source from which the quote was taken, that means said quote is either a generic buzz line slapped on by the production company from their “stock movie hype” database or it was taken from one of the crew members describing their last bowel movement. As such, don’t be surprised if the next Hellraiser sequel says something like “It totally disrespected my toilet, son!” or “It’ll make you wonder when you had the time to eat all that corn!” on it’s box.

As for the real final tally, Snakes on a Train can’t live up to the movie it’s trying to be and, though it’s base plot and final scenes manage to garner a bit of notoriety from me, it’s not worth paying for the “privilege” of seeing or wading through the chest-high refuse and medical waste that is the rest of the movie just to get to it.