We’re out of Anaconda sequels at the moment (there’s a reboot in the works, confirmed 3 months ago with Tom Gormican, better known for The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent) , so let’s start digging into another barrel o’ snakes by rummaging – as we usually end up doing – through Fred Olen Ray filmography.
Not that i picked up the movie this way, it was another random find on Amazon Prime Video, but there’s no real surprise to see him listed as director… under one of his pseudonyms, Ed Raymond this time, why shouldn’t be his work?
Not to be confused with Silent Venom from 2009, also directed by Fred Olen Ray, in which he realized he could put snakes inside of submarines instead of planes.
For whatever reason this time the tone is a bit more serious, the shlock is dialed back, like there’s even them treating an infected person dying on the hospital bed without immediatly ignoring it or cutting to some stereotyped sheriff eating donuts with the gun, or crap like that.
Mind you, it’s still utterly stupid, from the beginning where the underground explosion (caused by some terrorists in disguise) that blows up an entire building… but thankfully the mutant snakes infected with a virus were also made to be explosion and fire proof, so they manage to slink away and hide underground in a small town in California, until an earthquake makes them go in another exodus, one that involves biting – and in turn infecting – a lot of people.
Which also sums up the plot, minus the easily guessable part where some doctors are trying to find out where the fuck this deadly virus has originated from, but that it’s almost a given, like the military getting involved and making things worse as usual.
Though it’s hard to emphatize or side with the abundant white trash characters when they get told not to do a thing, do it anyway, and die because of it. The lesser stupid character are about as stock as they come, either the evil military dude that would bomb the city to avoid the virus spreading, and the divorced expert doctors that are divorced only so the crisis can get them together again.
And of course this is an epidemic that could have been easily contained if anyone had some common sense or basic intelligence, like checking a wound caused by an object used by a patient with some kind of virus on him, or the patient avoiding to sneeze on the food he prepares while he also secretly escaped from the hospital to come back to work, the utter tool.
Another surprise is that the mutated, virus carrying snakes aren’t CG elongated turds, but actual rattlesnakes, and i have no idea if this was a deliberate choice or the FX team couldn’t be arsed to make crappy CG for the snakes, but i’ll take it as a positive, considering other shit movies about snakes i’ve seen from “Mr. Ray”.
Again, i’ll reiterate that this Fred Olen Ray movie being a lot less shlocky was not in the cards, sure, there’s a scene where a rattlesnake comes out of a terlet, but there’s no nudity, random fucking or anything sleazy, i would assume because someone pre-bonked the director on the head and told him “no horny”, makes more sense than assuming it’s so PG because it’s a TV movie, which is not as it’s debuted on home video, but again, these terms often mean very little in term of “rules”.
If it’s for the better or the worse it’s up to you to decide, i won’t change it’s as subpar as they come from this director and this strain of disaster movies about killer animals, meaning it’s bad, there’s some old actor roped in (Treat Williams this time) to increase the overall acting quality – at least in theory -, the plot its predictable and cliched as expected, but at least Ray knows how to make these somewhat digestible-watchable, even when there’s nothing special about them.
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