Jennifer Fallon - the Official Site

I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a one word description of this…ahem… thriller and the best I could do was: silly. Ridiculous was a close second, followed by stupid, moronic and just plain bad.

This movie is up there with the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. In fact, according to the Internet Movie Database, the “film's title originated at an after-work happy hour among Hollywood colleagues to see who could come up with the most awful pitch for a movie.”

Happy hour has a lot to answer for.

This movie should have come and gone in the blink on an eye and only been allowed to see the light of day for one of those E! Channel specials called “101 Actors Who Will Do Anything For Money” . Unfortunately, due to Blair Witch type buzz on the Internet, in March 2006 New Line Cinema arranged a 5 day re-shoot to add new scenes, which took the movie from PG to R-rated even though the film had finished principal photography in September 2005. They added more sex, more nudity and Samuel L Jackson’s immortal line, "I've had it with these mother f*****g snakes on this mother f*****g plane!". This line, which first appeared in an internet parody of the movie long before it was released, changed the whole tone of the film. I’m not going to say “for the better’ because it’s a pretty stupid idea in the first place.

Now, I’m quite sure if you’re willing to totally suspend disbelief or you’ve never seen a live snake, you might accept that a hold full of exotic snakes rampaging through a pheromone-enhanced plane in an elaborate scheme masterminded by a crime lord to kill a witness on the way to testify against him is the foundation for a top-class horror thriller.

If, like me and everyone else in the audience, however, you know that snakes can’t fly, you might have a bit of trouble swallowing the whole premise. Likewise if you have even the most basic grasp of herpetology. Because you’ll know even the most dangerous snakes on Earth (which live here in central Australia, btw) don’t have multiple rows of teeth, that snakes who bite their prey have different shaped heads than those who crush it, and that the deadliest snake in the world (the inland taipan) takes a good 15 minutes to an hour to kill you. Not, as they do in Snakes on a Plane, instantaneously.

Unless of course, you’ve had sex or are unattractive or necessary to fly the plane, which seems to be how the snakes pick their victims.

Having said that, the film clip for the theme song at the end of the film was worth waiting for, and the reason Snakes on a Plane gets the extra star from me. It really was a dreadful movie, but at least I was entertained.