Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Brainsbell
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Bluebell Alcock
Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies
Sam Panico
Satan himself releases snakes on a small town, all to get back at the ancestor of St. Patrick. If this sentence makes you say, "And then?" you are the person that this movie was made for.The majority of director Bob Claver's work is on the small screen. So if this feels like a TV movie to you, that's fine. Is that even a bad thing? Not in these parts.Father Tom Farrow (Fritz Weaver, Creepshow, Demon Seed) has lost his faith. His town? It's getting a new dog track. And then the devil makes all the snakes go crazy! He teams up with Dr. Maggie Sheridan (Gretchen Corbett, Let's Scare Jessica to Death) and herpetologist Dr. Paul Hendricks to save his town before its too late.This is the debut of Christina Applegate. Her mother, Nancy Priddy, also appears in the film.It was shot by Dean Cundy (Halloween), so there are some moments of artistic flourish despite the low budget. There's also a scene where a snake gets its head shot off that had me fall on the floor in a fit of hysterics.Honestly, I've never seen a movie that somehow rips off Jaws and 1970's occult cinema at the same time. It also has some elements of rural backwoods melodrama, so if you like that sort of thing, this would be the movie for you. Also - a drunken priest! I'm sure here's an IMDB search list for that!
Per Myrhill
At first I thought that this would be a really bad movie. I tend to ignore what other people have to say. After this one I'll be more careful on how I choose to spend my time. I hope that this review will spare others from this movie.It's just not bad, it is REALLY bad. After the buildup in the first scene, who had all good ingredients to be something good it derailed totally.I lost interest when they used the disgustingly old cliché that coroners is eating their lunch over dead bodies in the morgue. Not that I find it disgusting to eat in the presence of dead bodies. I just find the cliché itself, old, tired and boring.Coroners have access to proper canteens. I have visited a real morgue in my line of work. I never saw as much as a piece of fruit in the autopsy room.Back to this catastrophe of a movie. Somehow Satan have spawned into our world as a snake. The snake keeps biting, as snakes tend to do, its way to some random small town in, yes once again, America, where a priest who's ancestors was cursed by druids battles the snake.One could possible find some symbolic values but this movie should be forgotten and I hope I can spare you from wasting your time on this.The only thing worth mentioning is a young Christina Applegates appearance.
Coventry
Imitating the success of a certain horror classic is quite easy. Everybody did it back in the early 80's. All you had to do was steal the basic concept of a great film and/or box office hit, add more nastiness and preferably some sleazy sequences as well, and you had yourself an insignificant but enjoyable horror movie. Ain't nothing to it. One thing that does require a lot of courage (and tasteless insanity, for that matter), however, is to simultaneously rip off TWO legendary horror classics even though their plots have absolutely nothing in common! The title of this shameless piece of 80's cheese reveals it all: we are dealing here with a cash-in of both "Jaws" AND "The Exorcist". How can you possibly blend the concept of animals on the rampage with satanic possession, I hear you ask? Well, you can't… Surely the first draft of the screenplay made this clear as well, but they went along and made the movie anyways. In a godforsaken rural town in Alabama, Satan suddenly and for no apparent reasons possesses a rattlesnake. Or maybe He simply just appears in the form of a virulent snake? Actually, that would explain why it suddenly turns into a King Cobra. I don't know, either that part of the script didn't get explained properly or I wasn't paying enough close attention. Numerous dead bodies, mutilated with giant gaping holes in their faces, have to pop before the local priest decides to come into action. He's a direct descendant of a family of Druids, so if anyone can exorcise this slithery venomous demons, it's him. In good old Jaws tradition the town's prominent council members also refuse to admit there's a problem, since they just opened a fancy dog-racing track and hope to lure many tourists with this attraction. "Jaws of Satan" is a delightfully inept and imbecilic low-budget horror flick, typical for the early 80's, with clumsy effects and laughable "stunts". This is the type of movie that wants us to believe one of the characters comes into face to face contact with a deadly snake, even though you can clearly spot the dirty Plexiglas that separates them. Another character, the female lead heroine, spends an incredibly long time on the bed with a snake whilst nothing happens. She calls her boyfriend for help, and even though he's in his motel room a couple of streets away and still needs to get dressed first, the snake patiently awaits his arrival before launching attack. There are a bunch of underdeveloped sub plots that lead nowhere, like a rapist biker chasing the heroine or a spiritual medium lady that can't even predict her own death. On a slightly more positive note, the snake-bitten faces of the victims are quite cool (although it's the exact same make-up repeated 6 times) and the rural Alabama filming locations are very enchanting. And yes, that cherubic little blond girl is indeed the future Kelly Bundy in her very first appearance.
Robert J. Maxwell
SPOILERS.I don't really know how it's possible to "spoil" this movie or two give two figs about it.Let me see. The plot. Okay. A rash of odd and lethal snakebites begins turning up in a small town, much to the puzzlement of the doctor played by Gretchen Corbett, looking mighty slim and much cuter than my doctor. Nobody else seems particularly bothered though, despite the fact that all the deciduous trees are bare and all good snakes should be comfortably hibernating. Never mind, though. The priest (Fritz Weaver) is losing his faith or his confidence or something. He boozes it up and doesn't seem to be having a lot of fun. No joke to be unpopular in a small town. Maybe it's partly because, although he seems to be Catholic in that he lapses into Latin at a critical point, he says the mass facing in the wrong direction. At any rate his ontological Angst seems to have drawn Satan to his little town, with Weaver as the bullseye. The original snake, a cobra, arrives by train. (Don't ask.)That's the Exorcist part of it. The Jaws part has to do with one of those money-mongering venture capitalists who wants to open a dog-racing track and doesn't want to alarm any visitors with all this talk about crazy snakes. How dumb can you get? He could have solved the entire problem simply by opening a mongoose-racing track.Oh, there's one of those expert academicians drawn in from the outside to provide us with herpetological knowledge that the other characters (and the audience) don't have. He really doesn't add much, in the way of herpetological expertise, plot development, or character. He's only needed once, to rush in and save Corbett from a beautiful specimen of the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus adamanteus. I know. The snake seems to have changed from a cobra to a rattlesnake. This happens to be a rather wise rattlesnake, having followed Corbett into the shower and peeked at her, but it's a rattlesnake nonetheless. But then there are a LOT of different kinds of snakes used here. The, um, "king cobra" seems to have roused all of them. I spotted a common and harmless gopher snake among the mess. The herpetologist's curiosity isn't aroused by the presence of cobras, native to Asia and Africa, in a small American town, or what an Eastern diamondback is doing so far out of its range in the southeast US. At least one of the snakes is visibly killed on camera, which is pretty rotten if you ask me. The target should have been the screenwriters.But the plot is so full of holes that it's not really worth going into. Speaking of holes, the cobra accosts the priest in a graveyard and while he's trying to run away he falls into an empty freshly dug grave and can't get out. The cobra, it seems, has this thing about crucifixes. What would have happened to Weaver if he'd been a rabbi and pulled a Mogen David we can only speculate about. At one point, Corbett, wearing a neat red dress, is lying down in a cave full of snakes presided over by the Satanic Elapid. I don't know how she wound up on this rock altar. It's done offscreen. The priest shows up, waving his cross, removes the supine Corbett, which is a pity because she really looked very sacrificial, lies down in her place wearing a surplice, kisses his cross, encants some Latin mumbo jumbo, and the snake disappears in a pillar of flame. If he'd have done that at the beginning he could have saved all of us an hour. Oh, by the way, the little girl -- there always has to be a kid to naive to recognize danger signals -- is played by Christina Applegate.
