WELL, what did you expect? Citizen Kane? After the orgy of internet speculation, and the famous reviewing ban imposed on the critics before the film’s release, the title that launched a thousand websites struggles to live up to the electronic hype.
David R. Ellis’s mile-high thriller does exactly what it says on the tin with an admirable lack of taste. It has the flavour of a classic 1970s disaster movie, but little of the inadvertent comic sparkle that made those dinosaurs so easy to spoof.
Samuel L. Jackson is the FBI hardnut, Neville Flynn, who has the job of escorting a crucial witness from Honolulu to a murder trial in Los Angeles. The evil Asian ganglord, Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), has other ideas. The last witness to try to testify against Kim had his eyes gouged out and his body fed to pigs. To kill the latest witness, Eddie drugs a huge consignment of poisonous snakes with pheromones and puts them on the aircraft taking Jackson and his terrified guest to LA. “That’s great news,” growls Jackson. “Snakes on crack.”
Realism was never going to interfere with this deranged masterplan. Thousands of crazed snakes duly sink their teeth into the usual array of Hawaiian holidaymakers: kickboxers, rap stars, sickly children, supermodels and randy teenagers.
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The naked couple in the lavatory are, of course, the first to go as a lime green monster wraps his poisonous fangs around a bouncing cheer- leader’s right nipple. It gets better. In the loo down the corridor a man mumbles, “How’s my big boy?” a split second before a cobra latches on to his big boy with true relish.
The pilot was never going to get beyond the first reel. “We’ve just lost avionics,” he screams, clambering into the hold, never to emerge. What does that mean exactly? “It means this bird will go down faster than a Thai hooker,” says the co-pilot. The aircraft duly hits the thunderstorm from hell five minutes later. The lights go out, the air conditioning packs in and the craft pitches towards the ocean. The shrieking passengers storm up to the first class lounge of this South Pacific 747 accompanied by flying trollies and a man with a broken stiletto heel in his ear.
Films that revel in the glory of being this arm-chompingly bad will always attract a cult following, but the director makes the fatal mistake of letting entire reels slip into the tedious. The splurge of serpentine special effects starts to pall after yet another snake forces its way down someone’s throat.
As some sort of mad sop to art, Ellis supplies us with blurry, snake-eyed shots of the targets. It does nothing to heighten the general aesthetics.
Afraid that his film could never match the hype, Ellis beefed up the bad language and reshot scenes to steep them in gratuity and gore. The fight-back by Jackson and the survivors brings tears to the eyes. “Who’s the daddy now, bitch,” shouts a camp steward shoving a viper into a microwave.
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I leave the last words to Jackson, who barks his way through the film with a breathtaking lack of irony. “That’s it. I’ve had it with these m************ snakes on this m************ plane.” My sentiments exactly.