Snakes on a Train
As it stands right now, it is exceedingly rare to find a person who is not aware of Snakes on A Train, New Line’s Samuel Jackson starring movie which has become an internet phenomenon even before being released in cinema. Anyone who has seen and put in such advertising dollars, combined with what can only be described as a comprehensive active marketing campaign would be hard pressed not to have come across it in some shape or form at least that’s the strategy that Malachi Brothers are relying on this time around with their new movie, Snakes On A Train, a straight to video schlock that is advertised with ’100 trapped passangers, 3000 venomous vipers’ on its front cover which shows a giant snake eating a train. It worked though it was able to grab this reviewers attention.
Now what about the movie? Of course it’s a ripoff but is it at least any good? No, it is not good but in a weird twist it is very gory, quite fun, and has a decent pace and on that basis it makes for an entertaining way to spend a few hours. It also contains pointless scenes of nudity, subplots that go unresolved, cringeworthy dialogue and graphics that wouldn’t even make the cut in the PlayStation era. All that said, most of those factors tend to make the experience worthwhile and in this case the theory stands correct.
In Mexico, we meet the shaman guy and his wife, Alma, who is gravely ill in the desert. What’s their plan? They want to cross the border into Texas, hop onto a train, and make their way to Los Angeles, where the shaman’s uncle can cure Alma of a horrible burden. Apparently, she has snake curses that were placed on her long ago.
After some squabbles over payment, she gets them onto the train as one of her childhood friends comes to the rescue and buys off the crooks. Best of all, they manage to catch a train headed for Mexico. On the train are a few stoner surfers, two attractive girls, and some really scary people including a cowboy and a Middle Eastern dude, an engineer with a great mustache, and a totally inept electrical engineer trying to hit on an older woman. Not to mention a man and his girlfriend with her daughter are also on board. It might not add up to a hundred people on the plane, but it’s close.
Regardless, once the train begins to move, Alma’s condition worsen when she later begins to vomit snakes. In the beginning, not as much as one would expect for such an occurrence because they are small and her shaman husband manages to catch them in small containers. But apparently, when they arrive at his uncle’s house, he intends to put them back inside of her but explanations as to the purpose of such a plan?
Well, take your pick, for it is never explained just as the party must be expected to do. Soon, however, her sickness becomes more serious as well more enlarged snakes come out of her and she starts to throw chunks of green jello.
The two cute girls deal with problems of their own. The blonde, it seems, has taken a huge bag of cocaine on a flight and that nasty cowboy looking bloke on board is a narc. Somehow he has no qualms about talking business with blondie. For a job well done and the opportunity to tickle her funbags, she appears to be able to waltz free of these losers. But alas, the suspicious brown man is also a police officer and he apprehends Cowboy Dirtbag just as he is malingering with his intentions.
Oh snap! At this moment they begin shooting at each other, and God knows it was the turn of the snakes to start devouring everyone. The guys who were sneaking in the illegals onto the train turned out to be the first victims but not the last. Alma starts voicing her anger by throwing up more snakes, and her shaman husband, meanwhile, is losing it completely. Next, rubber snakes descend on children, garter snakes tear out of arms and through people’s abdomen, and conductor with Lemmy moustache is attempting to bring the train to a halt before it is too late.
My review may be somewhat unorthodox, but it’s a retarded movie. It functions, which is what can be said of the majority of the films, but with a severe drop in quality. It is unthinkable to watch such a high potential movie and know that, for unexplained purposes, a dozen tiny subplots will be ditched and useless; and then suddenly a huge computer generated snake will pop up from nowhere in the course of the action, the acting can make you cry in pain, the dialogues are pathetic and the characters have no depth.
But all that is irrelevant if you have a cool-looking snake and a plethora of blood. Although the film claims that there are possibly three thousand poisonous vipers on board, I’d guess that there were some tamed boa constrictors and a few striped ransom snakes slithering around everywhere. The snakes were very redundant, suffocating people who attempted to flee, gnawing through wrists, arms and ultimately chests and hearts.
I think, the excessive rudeness in the content quality is mild, yet they did manage to add it but in moderation. During the course of the film, there are a number of times where excessive violence occurs for example, a great scene when a man had his heart thrown out of his chest, rather intriguing.
There’s also the completely gratuitous nudity that appears for no reason but is very welcome if only there had been more of it!
The primary disappointment lies in the failure to maximize the suspense of the gladiator snakes versus passengers conflicts rather too early in the film. Consequently, the first twenty minutes of the film can be described as slovenly in pace. But after this phase, the blood bloodshed begins and funny events are experienced, so big up Malachi Brothers.
For a shot on DV production, Snakes On A Train doesn’t look half bad. There’s some aliasing and some line shimmering throughout but that’s the worst of the problems here. The color reproduction is good, black levels are also good, only some mild mpeg compression artifacts appear in some few scenes. Skin colors are good and natural looking while level of details are adequate. It’s not a reference quality transfer by any means, but for a low budget movie the feature looks quite good on this release.
You have two options: either a standard stereo Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack or a more complex sound option which is Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. The 5.1 track is the one to go with if your hardware can allow it, because it is much more aggressive, as well as adding some pleasing directional effects to the action and ‘snake intense’ moments in the rear channels. The only complaints are some sections where the speech is slightly obscured and some spots where the sound effects and performers come together but these are more of the exception than the norm. Everything is good here for the most part.
The primary added feature is the commentary track of the two Malachi Brothers with one actor and the director of cinematography. The levels on this are quite low for some reason as well as some participants being louder than others which can be slightly irritating at times. Nevertheless, there is some decent material here such as how some of the effects were achieved, the actors’ impressions of working with food, the crew’s impressions of working with real snakes among others and some casting and location information as well as some decent technical details on the film.
After that we are given an eight minute making of featurette where most of the lead actors and actresses speak about their roles in this particular work. To many of these, it isn’t much more than the ordinary sound bite interviews of a talking head but the screentime of featured behind the scenes and effects that we are shown here is quite enough to make this worth the look.
Completing the bonus content is a minute’s worth of entertaining outtakes where the engineer manages to mispronounce ‘runaway train’ in quite a number of ways. Additionally, there are deleted scenes that shed some light on the cocaine smuggling subplot. One would also be able to watch Sam Kubrick’s Casa De Mi Padre’s trailers including, Snakes On A Train, the 911 Commission Report, Pirates Of Treasure Island, 666 The Child among others. Other extras include menus and chapter stops for the feature.
Clearly intended to ride the New Line release campaign of snakes on a plane marketing template, this film has a ‘no’, ‘no’ appeal which is certainly spectacular in itself. If puke spewing Mexican women and an unnecessary coke smuggling subplot with a scantily clad lady who does not provide anything worthwhile and just flashy CGI monsters are your idea of entertainment, this one would fill the bill. While in most cases, Snakes On A Train should not be entertaining, it is in fact engrossing.
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