It began innocently enough on October 10th, 2005, with the simple statement, “But that’s life. Snakes On A Plane.” The very next day, I told the story of how I came to learn about the film, and how badly I anticipated its release date. I even charged my audience to make the phrase a part of our modern lexicon as a synonym for “self-evident, obvious, inescapable, or patently true”. I mentioned it again in passing on the next day. Two weeks later, I guaranteed the film would gross “a fuckload of money.” Nearly two months later, I noted in a Top Ten list that Snakes On A Plane had received an official entry in the Urban Dictionary, and lamented the fact that my definition was way better than “A simple existential observation like ‘shit happens’.” At the time, I didn’t realize that the my first utterance of the film’s title was used in that exact context. The last reference I made to the film was in July of 2006, almost nine months after my initial reference. It was in a post ridiculing a news item published by Pitchfork about producers and independent rock bands. The sentence, “The reason for my Pitchfork insult was due to their deeming something that I feel is self-explanatory to be a major headline. Like Snakes On A Plane is the height of obviousness, ‘indie band to self-produce album,’ seems equally inescapable.”
So, it’s fitting that it took me almost eighteen months after the movie was released to actually sit down and watch it. That’s right. I never even saw Snakes On A Plane, even after buying the hoodie and talking the film up on this website all those months in advance. Last night after work Nicci and I rented the film from Blockbuster and sat down to watch it. We were joined by Tom, who’d already seen the film. So what did I think?
The film certainly didn’t disappoint, at least on a “this shit is so bad it’s hilarious” level. It would have been even better if the producers didn’t latch onto the hype and go back to film extra scenes just to alter the movie to meet its rabid fans’ expectations. If they’d left it in its original form, I have no doubt it could have reached an apex of terribleness not witnessed since Plan 9 From Outer Space, or Ishtar. Unfortunately for the film, it suffered from these attempts to class the film up with more vulgarity, more tits, and more implausible snake-bite deaths.
Still, the film had some amazing awfulsome moments. The writing was so atricious, almost every line spoken was laughable. The main bad guy saying, “Don’t you think I’ve exhausted every other option? HE SAW ME!” was perfect. I’d love for that scene to have been extended so we could hear what all those other options were before he came to the idea of putting a ton of snakes on a plane. What about the pilot talking about how dangerous it was to have snakes slithering around the plane, because if they were to “trip a circuit or a relay or a hydraulic, this bird goes down faster than a Thai hooker.” I love the juxtaposition of fancy mechanical vocabulary with allusions to oral sex and Thai hookers. Or the one passenger who yelled “It’s the snakes!” after all the lights went out in the cabin. No shit?
One thing that plagued me as I was watching was the use of Coral Snakes. Considering a huge majority of the reptiles were computer generated, why wouldn’t those responsible for creating the snakes use actual Coral Snakes as their template instead of Milk Snakes. Haven’t they heard the expression, “Red touch black, venom lack; red touch yellow, killed a fellow?” Would it have been that hard to make the snakes look a tad more realistic?
vs. 
I guess I got what I anticipated out of the film. A ton of goofy laughs from people being bitten on their dicks and their eyes, more goofy laughs from horribly delivered dialog…it was about what I expected from the film. I don’t think I’ll be sitting down to watch it again anytime soon…but if I do, I’m sure the experience would be heightened by some laughter supplements…
Afterwards, we watched Dukes Of Hazzard: The Beginning, because you can see Nicci in a towel during one scene, and dressed like a cheerleader later. We didn’t get very far into it before we started fast-forwarding.
Leave a comment