The Snake King (2005) Reviews

• Snake King - The New King of Awful Giant Snake Movies!

  The_Foywonder2005-04-15

  Someone at the Sci-Fi Channel must have thought making a movie about a giant, five-headed snake in the Amazon would make for a nifty monster movie. It probably could have if it hadn't been for the fact that the giant, five-headed snake is so huge that we generally only see one, two, or three heads on the screen at any given time. That is until the climax of the movie when all five are finally shown, albeit briefly, and even then you never really get a full body view of the creature to figure out how everything is interconnected. The movie establishes that the snake has a tail so they can't use the excuse of it having heads at both ends. I want to know where the hell the fourth and fifth heads disappeared to for the first three quarters of the movie. Were they on a smoke break? Were they given conscientious objector status for refusing to take part in the killing if innocent people? Were they off auditioning for a role in Python 3? Oh, but wait, there are still more problems with the giant, five-headed snake. Despite the fact that it appears to be big enough to give Godzilla a heck of a fight, this colossal, multi-headed snake is still able to hide undetected in the jungle brush until it's too late. The noise it makes when slithering through the jungle is minimal and keep in mind we are talking about an enormous monster with five-heads, each at least the size of an automobile. If it wasn't constantly roaring (This snake doesn't hiss. It roars.), then it would barely generate any noise at all. People are constantly running away before coming to a stop and looking up just in time for one of the heads to lurch down and nab them. Despite being gigantic it still consistently managed to not only move around unseen, it actually sneaks up on people. And if that wasn't enough, there are some serious continuity issues regarding the giant, five-headed snakes' size. It appears to suffer from Deep Star Six syndrome, and by that I mean its size changes depending on what is required of it in the scene. This is highlighted in the climax set inside its lair where it seems to shrink and enlarge at random. Each head is the size of an automobile and its cave entrance only appears big enough to fit one head and neck at a time so we don't even get an explanation as to how the thing even manages to get inside this cave chamber to begin with. Heck, at one point, this gargantuan serpent even manages to hide underwater in a small river just waiting to spring out and surprise someone. Good grief! These are just the problems with the monster. And don't argue suspension of disbelief because there is a huge difference between suspension of disbelief and insulting one's intelligence. Worst of all, the CGI used to bring the giant, five-headed snake is some of the least convincing I've ever seen in a Sci-Fi Channel movie, and believe me, that is really saying something. The fact that the monster turned out to be such a conceptual catastrophe is kind of a good thing because I'd hate to see a potentially cool movie monster wasted on a production as lame, formulaic, and downright dull as this stinker was. A complete waste of time and energy.

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• Boring, pretentious rip-off of Anacondas.

  Bob_Tanaka2005-04-14

  Okay, I liked Anacondas. I thought it was a fun, old-fashioned jungle movie. But why on earth would you pick that movie to rip-off? It strikes me as a one-time deal, and it's really amazing it turned out as good as it did. Snake King is a pretty much carbon copy, with almost all the enjoyability taken out and a ton of pretentiousness put in. It starts out looking like an enjoyably predictable jungle adventure with giant snakes and human-sacrificing tribes. However, half-way through it takes a hard right and portrays the tribe as a peaceful, wise group who will all die if the snake is killed (because the script says so, okay!). The villain, heroine, and hero are all immediately identifiable as such (incidently, the hero never does anything heroic except for arguing with the villain. otherwise he's generally being saved all the time.) The snake in the movie makes no sense. It apparently has multiple heads, but why is never even touched on, nor is it touched on how the water gives you immortal life, or anything (the snake, like the tribe, is allowed a certain "heroic" stance, despite the fact that it was just scene killing many people in gruesome ways, like the tribe. But, you know, PC). Ultimately, not a movie to waste your time on, except perhaps from a bad DTV standpoint, but even then the lack of anything interesting for the monster to do (and the attempts to make it seem less of a monster for no reason) does take away considerably from the fun.

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• Another creature feature with terrible effects & not enough 'creature'.

  poolandrews2007-06-20

  The Snake King, or Snakeman as it's more commonly known, starts as New York based pharmaceutical company GenTech announces in a press conference that during a recent expedition in the Amazon they discovered a corpse of a man which when analysed showed he died at the age of 300. Company scientists Dr. Rick Gordon (Larry Day) & Dr. Susan Elters (Jayne Heitmeyer) are going to lead another expedition into the Amazon to finds his tribe & discover the secret of living for 300 years, what could possibly go wrong? Well, for a start their helicopter is struck by lightening & crash lands in the middle of the Amazon, then Rick turns out to be a complete d*ck & to top it off a huge five headed snake wants to eat them all. Can their local guide Matt (Stephen Baldwin) lead them to safety & is finding the secret to eternal life really worth being eaten by a huge five headed snake for? This made-for-TV Canadian American co-production was written & directed by Allan A. Goldstein & is yet another Nu Image produced creature feature flick complete with all the clichés that these films seem determined to include. The script takes itself very seriously & is basically pretty much the same sort of thing as Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) with it's plot about a youth potion in the Amazon guarded by a snake, in this case a ridiculous looking one of the giant five headed variety. Lets go through the clichés which Nu Image insist on having in their creature features, good guys including a beautiful female scientist & a rugged hero type who end up falling in love, the antagonistic bad guys who want something the creature is protecting/in the way of, the disposable character's who don't say anything & have no opinions on anything because they are there to get eaten, the supposedly dramatic moralistic ending which will leave most viewers wiping away the tears of either laughter or boredom, the single isolated location to keep production costs down & an abundance of awful CGI computer effects. Yep, they're all here present & correct. Unfortunately Snake King is even more lame than a lot of other Nu Image 'classics' like Cyborg Cop (1993), Shark Attack (1999), their best film to date Spiders (2000), Crocodile (2000), Octopus (2000), Mansquito (2005) & a plethora of sequels & other killer Shark flicks, I mean most of the above are pretty bad films but a lot of them at least had fun elements, unintentionally hilarious moments & a sense no one was taking things too seriously but The Snake Kingis just a dull, boring, unoriginal mess of a film that isn't even good for any laughs & doesn't have any good looking babes in it either. At least the five headed snake survives at the end & gets to eat lots of humans but it's still a stinker. Director Goldstein doesn't do anything special here, the pace is slack, the plot is dumb, the editing is awful & the special effects are terrible. The CGI computer effects look awful, unless you have literally million's to spend on them GCI always ends up looking worse than your average Saturady morning cartoon with badly animated monsters that look stupid. The wonderful Ray Harryausen stop-motion animated seven headed Hydra from Jason and the Argonauts (1963) looks 100 times better & more realistic than the five headed snake here. There's a few gory bit here, there's some severed arms, people are bitten in half & there's a brief scene when someone has their stomach sliced open & their guts spill out. With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 the filmmakers were obviously working on a tight budget & it's a surprise they actually managed to shoot the thing on location in Brazil. Awful looking five headed snakes & helicopter crashes apart it's reasonably well made but it's bland & forgettable without an ounce of style. The acting here is bad & Stephen Baldwin is the token 'celebrity' actor who obviously needed rent money & a free holiday in South America. The Snake King is a pretty awful creature feature which offers nothing new over the countless killer Shark, Octopus, Insect, Lizard & Arachnid type films which seem to be everywhere & it doesn't even any genuine unintentional laughs either. Definitely not recommended, I'm not sure why they keep making these sorts of films other than there are people out there who like them & to satisfy demand Nu Image's next giant killer snake flick seems to be called MegaSnake (2007) & premiers in July apparently...

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• Surprisingly well made and entertaining

  TheEightiesAreBack2009-07-06

  I was real surprised with "Snakeman". It was actually a pretty good little independent movie. First, it was well shot. The director chose to use film instead of digital (which a lot of B-movies) do. And there were some great jungle shots of the Amazon. Second, the movie was fairly well acted. I really thought everyone in the film was a pretty seasoned actor. Stephen Baldwin was definitely a good hero. Third, they had some real cool production design. They had snake pillars in the jungle. I love that whole look. The only real downside was that there were some fairly bad CGI shots of the snake. But, it's definitely entertaining if you're looking for that whole "monster in the jungle" concept.

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• A special place in hell is reserved for this movie

  zombie-322007-02-25

  This was one hell of a stinker. Comparing this to an early Dr Who episode from 1960's Who had the worse scrip: The Snake King Who had the worse dialog: The Snake King Who had the worse acting: The Snake King Who was more predictable: The Snake King Who had the most fake special effects: The Snake King (This is going against cardboard cutouts, men in wetsuits, and obvious miniatures.) The Snake King did have one advantage over the Dr Who episode it was in colour. It does have a good drinking game if you have a drink every bad line or when a henchman gets killed you are more likely to pass-out from alcoholic poisoning than pass halfway through the movie.

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