Ssssssso, Packers won the Superbowl, then? Woo? Honestly, I don’t know who won the last Superbowl. Or even who played in the last Superbowl, for that matter. In fact, Giant Spider Invasion is the only reason I know that the Packers ever won the Superbowl. I get my football news from Bill Rebane movies. I’d just as soon not get any football news at all because, like all major team sports, I find watching, hearing about, or even thinking about football to be just slightly more painful than major invasive abdominal surgery without anesthesia. I’m in unbelievable pain right now, because I keep typing the word “football”, and every time my fingers hit the keys to spell it out, I feel like someone is smashing my nuts with a cinder block. I should probably stop doing that, don’t you think? After all, that would be the sensible thing to do. The other sensible thing to do would be to shut the hell up about how much I hate football (ow, goddammit!) and get on with talking about the movie.
Dr. Carl Stoner (uh huh huh huh huh) is a herpetologist with a bit of a hitch in his mental giddyup. He thinks that, to make the perfect species of being to inherit the Earth, he owes it to the human race to make his life’s work trying to turn a man into a king cobra. Enter David, a promising young student at the local university where Dr. Stoner (roll me one, dude!) begs for his Crazy Bastard Research Grant. Poor David spends his time studying hard and being mercilessly picked on by Big McLargehuge from Space Mutiny, until Dr. Stoner (hey, it’s 4:20, you know what that means!) hand picks him as a summer lab assistant.
Hitching a ride with Dr. Stoner (I wonder if I can come up with enough stiflingly unfunny stoner jokes to keep up with how often I have to mention his name?) and his pet snake Harry, to whom he feeds small cups of booze (we had this pet snake, and one time we fed it some beer…it was slithering this way and that, it was all fucked up!), David arrives at casa de Stoner (where it’s always 4:20!). Ooh, look, David is making eyes at Stoner’s (good god, I can only do so many of these fucking things!) could-be-mildly-attractive-without-the-feathered-hair-and-giant-spectacles-drawing-attention-to-the-fact-that-the-snakes-have-more-lips-than-her daughter Christina.
Cue a lot of Stoner (Bob Marley! Jim Breuer! Half Baked! Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrgh!) sitting around talking about snakes, and David doing lab assistant-type things, and skinny dipping with Christina, and general run-of-the-mill goings on. Oh, and Dr. Stoner (oh, I fucking give up) convincing David that giving him an injection of cobra venom extract every day is to make him immune to the bite in case he ever slips up with Stoner’s pet cobra. And the shedding skin and changing shape of your face is perfectly normal, young man. Dude, for a herpetology student, David is a gullible fucking retard. You’d think constantly being snarled at by Stoner’s mongoose would give something away.
David and Christina go to a carnival, where David goes into the freak show to investigate claims of a snake man, but Christina refuses to follow. Outside, they’re accosted by Big McLargehuge and things kick into high gear. Big tries to break into their house that night and kills Harry. As revenge, Stoner plants a black mamba in Big’s shower. Returning home to discover Christina and David have slept together, and not wanting her to get his super-snake-man jizz all up in her unworthy human uterus, he sends her off to pick up a rare snake from Brazil at the post office (is sending a super-rare, extremely lethal snake through the postal service really a good idea, and how do you get it past customs? I, for one, am not game for sticking a venomous snake in my butt), giving him plenty of time to complete David’s transformation.
Christina, finally giving in to suspicions that her father is a loony tune Dr. Moreau wanna-be, heads back to the carnival where she sees the blue-eyed snake man and realizes it’s Tim McGraw (yes, that’s the character’s name, and no, it has nothing to do with shitty pop country music), Stoner’s old lab assistant.
She rushes home, with police in tow, but it’s too late. Stoner has been killed by his pet king cobra, and David has completed his transformation and is locked in a death-grip with the mongoose.
Apparently “the same team responsible for Planet of the Apes created the outstanding makeup and technology” used to turn Dirk Benedict into a snake. I’m sure Apes had a much bigger budget for the FX team to work with, but I have to wonder whether this is similar to the claim that the FX team who created Battlestar Galactica did all the work on Space Mutiny, because Davidsnake looks…not as good as the apes, we’ll say. But it’s a 70’s monster movie. Do you expect more than a guy with green paint and scales drawn on his face? I certainly don’t.
Besides, the movie is totally carried by Strother Martin as Dr. Stoner. It’s not hard to make an entertaining mad scientist, but it is often hard to make a great one. We spend a lot more time with Stoner than just seeing him in the lab roaring in his best Brian Blessed voice that he’s going to conquer the world. We see him relaxing with his pet snake, reading to him, feeding him booze, even putting him to bed in a human bed with soft covers. Sure, he’s crazy as a shithouse rat, but he’s a genuinely nice guy when he’s not sticking black mambas in people’s showers. It makes the ending all the more bitter when Stoner is killed by the animal he loves (not that we didn’t see it coming), and the plan that we’ve seen on a close, personal level from Stoner’s view fall apart at the fangs of a mongoose.
Still, Sssssss is plenty entertaining. To the average moviegoer it’d be boring as hell, but if you like drawn-out low budget 70’s sci-fi movies with lots of scientists standing around talking about stuff that would make actual scientists poop themselves in disbelief at the bullshit they were hearing, this one’s for you.
The Moral of the Story: If your ultimate goal is to turn a man into a king cobra, it would behoove you not to keep the one animal on the planet that eats king cobras for breakfast in the lab where you work. Bit of a
dues ex machine there, really.
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