Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:3	Budget Big Budget

I gotta confess. I really wanted to hate this movie. I mean how stupid can you get. Snakes attacking passengers on a plane. Snakes are cold blooded. Turn the AC up and cool the plane down to about 50 degrees and you've got rattlesnakes that cannot rattle and boa constrictors that can't constrict. But it turns out that I rather enjoyed the movie because as dumb as the premise is, this is a very nicely crafted movie. Fortunately the most obvious and annoying instances of product placement happen in the first 10 minutes while I still wasn't won over by the movie, so didn't bother me too much.

The movie starts out with our hero riding a Kawasaki motorcycle in Hawaii. As he stops to enjoy a Red Bull (did I mention that obvious product placement?), he witnesses a crime lord personally killing a prosecuting attorney. He eventually ends up with Samuel L. Jackson as his protector on the trip back to LA to testify against the bad guy. Unable to get to him any other way, the crime lord sneaks a couple hundred poisonous snakes into the airport, figures out which plane the witness is on, gets the snakes on the plane, disables a cargo door so that it stays open and has the leis for the passengers leaving Hawaii sprayed with a chemical that will make the snakes horny or aggressive (the script is not clear on this). Furthermore, there is a small explosive device with a timer to set the snakes free at about the halfway point on the flight.

Okay, so by this point we know we are in for an incredibly stupid movie and then you start to realize that the movie is really funny. There is the usual scene of a couple sneaking off to join the "Mile High" club but in this case they also smoke some pot and have sex which gives a second meaning to Mile High. Of course the snakes attack them biting the girl in the breast in the process. Less than a minute after this, another passenger gets up to go to the bathroom and he is attacked by a snake. Just as I was thinking, no they won't, they did. A snake bites him on his little head and he starts flailing about with a large snake attached to his johnson. At this point, I am rolling on the floor laughing. Which not only shows you a bit about my sense of humor, but also how well the director of this movie was able to zero in on it. Matt Baker is credited as "Man Bitten on Penis". That's gotta look good on a resume.

At one point, Samuel and one of the flight attendants go looking for weapons. When asked about silverware or knives, she produces a spork, they both look at the spork, wordlessly dismiss it as useless and proceed on to broken bottles. This is one of the most telling scenes in the movie. Lesser talents would have had Jackson going off on the stew, "how am I supposed to fight #$#$#$% snakes with a @#$##$ spork!". Instead the scene is beautifully restrained. The stew realizes immediately that they need something more and comes up with something worthwhile. The kind of respect for our heroine is one of the strong parts of the movie. Our hero is not the only one who comes up with good ideas during the course of the movie. The other characters are not there just to bask in his glory. All the surviving main characters survive by taking matters into their own hands when they need to. This is one of the movie's many similarities to "Tremors". No one sits around waiting to die. Both movies also paid homage to horror movies and managed to keep their tongue firmly in their cheek without becoming silly caricature.

While Snake on a Plane spends a good deal of time fleshing out the backgrounds of the surviving characters, the cannon fodder is pretty much left alone. In the deleted scenes there are several shots with dialog from the soon to be snake bitten. The director's comments were that they decided the dialog was too annoying. This is probably true, but also we don't really want to get to know any of these people because we don't want any emotional attachment when the die. Hearing the newlywed bride talk about how she doesn't want to die before she has kids could make her death scene later disturb us and detract from the fun. Make no mistake about it, we are watching this film to see snakes bite people in interesting ways. Moreover all the deaths in this movie are undeserved. Nobody teased Carrie, there was no sticking lightening rods in Jason's grave, and the name Candyman was not even uttered once. There has probably never been a more innocent set of victims in a movie than this group. As for the bad guys, other than probably being arrested for murder, nothing. Well one of them gets shot in the leg and bitten by a snake but he gets the anti-venom right away.

Joe Bob Briggs always said that in a good suspenseful movie anyone can die at anytime. I can vouch for that. Nothing throws me off balance more than losing a character that I was sure was going to come out okay. Needless to say, this movie never threw me off balance. The likely survival of all the key characters was established pretty early and never really challenged. While this certainly killed much of the suspense of the movie, it did make it easier to go along for the ride. So, check your brain at the door and take the movie at face value.

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