A long-ass fuckin’ time ago, in a town called Kickapoo… no, I lie. It wasn’t in Kickapoo. It was in Manly, Iowa. But it was a long-ass fuckin’ time ago, and Manly is technically a town (although “festering corpse curled at the feet of a long-dead rail depot” is probably more on the nose), so the veracity of the basic facts of my story is irrefutable. Anyway, at one point, back in the days when the e-mail account I now use as my own was started by Bob (of Invasion of the Bee Girls and Night of the Lepus fame) and I to send irritating joke messages to random people we found on Yahoo! People Search before e-mail addresses were removed from that program because of obnoxious assholes like us, you may have received an e-mail from a user named Crotch Spazzum! As retarded as that may seem to you now, the idea of a total stranger receiving an e-mail from Crotch Spazzum! containing nothing but 34k of the phrase “YEEEEAARRGHSPLATSPLATSPLATSPLAT! “copy/pasted over and over and over and fucking over again sent us into paroxysms of laughter during many an otherwise uneventful study hall. Well, that and rocking out to Exodus and the Galactic Cowboys.
I tell this story not because it has anything to do with tonight’s movie aside from a bit of word association, but simply because it is considerably more entertaining than the movie itself, and I figured that if you’re going to the trouble of reading my review, I owed you some small nugget of komedy gold mined from the vast Nordic tundra that is my Viking-descended brain. No use putting off the inevitable. On to the movie.
In an opening scene similar to the one from The Relic (read the book, it’s even more kickass than the movie, and all the subsequent Pendergast novels are probably the greatest detective stories since a certain Mr. Holmes hung up his cocaine ring and fell off that waterfall in the clutches of a certain Mr. Moriarty), a giant creature is captured. A continent away, Jason Kincaid awakes from a troubled sleep. Kincaid is a rich hunter, hobbled by an encounter with a giant snake that killed his brother. He has paid an expedition to capture the snake and bring it to his mansion for study. Also involved is Dr. Tom Brasilian, a parapsychologist who Kincaid has enlisted to delve into the reason for his telepathic link with the snake.
Meanwhile, a snake cult has somehow learned of Kincaid’s expedition and sends a loathsome private investigator named Crowley to steal the snake for them. Crowley’s agent aboard the transport ship gets curious and pokes around the crate, thinking it to be a shipment of cocaine, until the snake gets pissed and bites him. His body begins to boil beneath his skin, and he jumps overboard to end the pain. With no one to divert the shipment, the snake is sent to Kincaid and Dr. Tom (not Bela!) at the University where Tom works. The thermostat keeping the snake in a state of frozen hibernation is damaged, however, and the thing escapes.
Will Peter Fonda actually find something useful to do in this boring load of a movie? Will Oliver Reed’s mustache defeat the snake before it kills him? Do we give a shit that Susanne, Kincaid’s adopted daughter, turns out to be the daughter of the man killed in the original hunting accident, who turns out to be Kincaid’s brother, but for some stupid reason that was a big secret? The answers to all of these questions (all no, by the way) and more in the cash-strapped conclusion of Spasms!
What we have here is what should be a good monster movie. What we have instead is a movie that ran out of money during the last week of shooting and had to pad the shit out of the end of the movie with Oliver Reed having a spaz attack, running around his mansion crashing into things while having flashbacks of all the snake POV killings. Apparently when he was bitten, his mighty mustache acted as a sort of venom filter. Instead of the venom boiling his flesh into goop like everyone else, it infected him with a sort of telepathic virus which linked him to the snake.
We’re given a sort of half-assed explanation for this in that the snake is a demon that visits its Micronesian island once ever seven years to take damned souls with it back to Hell. Except it kills indiscriminately as an aggressive animal would, and in the end is killed by gunfire. I don’t think a demon on special missions would engage in random killing of souls that may not belong to it, nor would it be killed by Peter Fonda. So instead of a reason for the telepathic link, it just seems dumb. Fonda puts forth the idea that it may be an organic virus that caused the link, but it’s never explored further than that, so if that’s the tack we’re supposed to take, the movie is making a lot of assumptions about its audience.
The snake itself is… not so good. For being a 30-plus-foot monster, it’s about as big around as my wrist (with the exception of the one time it’s slithering through a tree, portrayed by a boa constrictor with a totally different coloration than the puppet), with a head totally out of proportion to its scrawny body. It’s slightly more convincing than the world’s biggest sock puppet from The Blade Master, but not a patch on the awesome beastie from Conan the Barbarian. Also, for some reason, the snake is a pyrokinetic, and can cause random patches of lawn and statuary to burst into flames.
In what is probably the most obviously shitty directorial decision in the movie aside from those stupid flashbacks at the end, Kincaid falls victim to the snake (without, for some reason, the gooey FX that accompanied the other deaths and gave the movie its one entertaining quality) just before Fonda comes back from vacation and shoots it. Once the snake is blasted, it falls to the ground near Kincaid. Cut to Kincaid’s dead face, and we pan left…BUT THE FUCKING SHOT FADES OUT BEFORE WE SEE THE GODDAMN SNAKE! What could have been at least an attempt at a dignified ending, showing the hunter and the hunted lying dead together, the scene instead makes the statement, “Here lies poor dead Jason Kincaid, slain by his obsession, BUT LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT HIS FUCKING LAWN INSTEAD, IT SURE COULD USE A TRIM AND SOME FERTILIZER!”
Ugh. I shake my head at you, movie. And yet, enough interesting ideas were put forth that I will attempt to track the book down on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble at some point. I would hope that the half-formed gobbledygook that passes for exposition in the movie is better thought out in the original text. If so, N’Gana Sunbu could be a pretty cool monster instead of a giggle-inducing marionette.
The Moral of the Story: Tangerine Dream will not make your silly snake puppet scarier, no matter how hard you wish upon that star. Besides, it’s just the reflection of a fading sodium bulb from the streetlight below your government-housing tenement room, William Fruet. Soon it will burn out, and then the crack dealers and gang bangers will come from their shadows to knock on your door. You owe them money. You spent the last of it on Oliver Reed’s spaz-out flashback scene, remember? Will they break your legs? Will they burn you with cigarettes? Will they make you kill and eat your pet cat, who lives better than you because he’s not afraid to eat from a dumpster? Or maybe, just maybe…oh, but I can’t say it. You’ll just have to see, won’t you? You’ll just have to see.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
-You’d have more fun playing Movie Polo with this one.
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