I thought of reviewing Park-chan Wook’s So I’m A Cyborg But That’s Ok, since it February and we recently got his latest film, No Other Choice.
But then an Arrow Video newsletter made me aware of them doing a Blu Ray/4K UHD release of Snakes On A Plane, which i promptly preordered.
I mean, we already did Tromeo & Juliet for the Valentine’s Day review, and i’m not sure we’re gonna bring back “Snake Month” this summer, might as well celebrate good ol’ Snakes On A Plane‘s 20th anniversary.
Yep, there’s no beating the “getting old” allegations, so strap that girdle up, take your pills, we’re going back to the very primordial soup, when Sharkenado wasn’t even a thought in the Asylum deseased pipeline of bullshit we’ll call a “mind”.
Oh, mind you, the Asylum did exist and in many ways proper started realizing who they really were due to Snakes On Plane, their had their proper epiphany in no small part thanks to this film, but we’ll discuss that when reviewing Snakes On A Train, sooner or later that review had to happen.
So i’ll hold off on that regard because the roots of Snakes On A Plane are to be found in the relatively early internet spaces of the 2000s, as when word got around that a movie called “Snakes On A Plane” was going in production, the internet made it a viral sensation, with plenty of blogs, sites and journals going bananas at the name, stupid ass concept, it having Samuel L “motherfuckin’” Jackson as the star, the infamous line spread like wildfire and it blew up so much that multiple people made songs for the movie, i kid you not (and a couple did get featured in), everyone was trying to get their mitts on the project before it released in theathers.
And yes, it might sound crazy now, but this got a theathrical release,, though it was originally meant as a PG-13 film but was later made into a R one, which is for the better as what would be the point of casting Jackson and not letting him swear, or have a premise of killer snake and no proper gore?
For better or for worse, Snakes On A Plane is arguably the very first “meme movie”, that even before release had online bases and was parodied, quoted, mocked, celebrated, and indeed the online feedback was taken into consideration and influenced the final product.
Yes, sure, technically its just a modern entry in the “killer animals/nature fights back” but also isn’t, as the plot isn’t about killer snakes doing it for the love of the game, the animals are part of a scheme to kill off an important witness that could actually testify against a violent mob boss and finally bring him down, as he had plenty of illegal snakes boarded on a plane moving from Hawaii to Los Angeles, and had the leis (the typical Hawaiin flower necklaces offered during travel) sprayed with feromones so the snakes would go feral and attack anyone, hopefully leading to the plane crashing and the witness dead.
Problem is, the mob didn’t realize that the witness was being protected by Samuel L. Jackson, here playing a hardened FBI agent, helped by his – and fairly weathered – police buddy….
It is pointless to say that this is a stupid ass idea for movie, a ludicrous plot, because yes, it is, and that’s the appeal, that’s the idea, as no amount of internet feedback was gonna change this into an Abel Ferrara film, this was coinceived as a dumb ass b-movie with an original, absurd main plot hook about – indeed – snakes on a plane, there’s something to be said about being this direct.
After all, it is exactly what it says on the tin, a quality that still is laudable today.
Okay, that’s enough of that, how did the movie itself age? Fairly well, honestly.
It’s tempting to see this film as “patient zero” for the upcoming avalanche of gonzo crap that The Asylum and similar companies would flood the market with in the 2010s and still do today, it is tempting but that would like blaming the Lumierès for Master Of Disguise, it’s stupid and shifts the blame from the crap factories more than willing to actually do crappier, faster and way cheaper imitations of already existing movies/show/whatever: you know, the ones actually responsable.
One thing that most of these companies doing these kind of b-movies in the wake of Snakes On A Plane didn’t want to learn is that having an outrageous idea isn’t enough in itself, and it works better when you actually committ to actually making a film work as such, when you put the extra effort it and do not pretend to and hope the “ironic” angle will excuse your lack of faith in the concept.
Yes, the concept of a snakes killing spree on an airplane is stupid, obviously, the execution also revels in its stupidity and its desire to have the snakes thin out the cast of varied stereotypes, but director David R. Ellis still manages to understand that the absurdity and ludicrous bullshit, even if funny in themselves, work better if there’s an effort to make the film have some grounding in reality, to try and take itself serious enough as a disaster-crime thriller affair, to not entirely crutch itself on the scenes of snakes biting people on the dick or entering their victims from the eyesockets.
Heck, they even manage to make some of the main characters be a lot less the cardboard stereotypes you’d already marked as “snake chow”, thanks to the solid acting, obviously Samuel L. Jackson is the star and he commits like a champ as always, but its worth noting the cast includes also Nathan Philipps (Australian Rules, Wolf Creek), Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire, Vynil, Will & Grace), Kenan Thompson (Good Burger, the Mighty Ducks sequels, All That), among others people that mostly had – and still have – careers before and after this.
More importantly, Snakes On A Plane still holds up as a fun, ridiculous ride, and is a cult classic in its own merit, even if the CG still looks cheap… we have seen so plenty worse than in hindsight it’s cheap, but not THAT cheap, there’s clearly a budget here and regardless it’s still a fun, entertaining movie that is exactly what it say it is AND what it wants to be, there’s a sincerity to it that has mostly gone out of style and is rarely emulated by cheaper b-movies factories.
And sadly i can’t blame too much those either from a purely economical standpoint, since Snakes On A Plane, while eventually did become profittable, did very bad at the box office when it released back in the day, and it’s no mystery that the subsequent home video released helped in that regard, because ultimately there is a market for these films, but it’s not necessarily the kind that floods cinemas on the regular for the latest popular thing, as there’s different kinds of “popular”.
I mean, there’s a certain hilarity to see how even back in 2006 a movie becoming a viral internet sensation did NOT translate in opening day weekend box office numbers to impress investors with, a lesson nobody fuckin learned because Sony was more than glad to humiliate themselves by putting Morbius back in theathers, thinking that it trending on social media would mean irony poisoned, hate-watch spurred ticket sales to the moon…. instead that people were having fun making (or retweeting) memes of a films that mostly weren’t gonna go see anyway, perfectly content to just clown on it on social media and leave it at that.
To conclude, i must say that the Arrow Video release is more than great, it’s a 4K restoration that looks great in UHD “format” (there’s also a regular Blu-Ray release with the same disc contents), the fake “safety warning in case of snakes” lobby card is fun, so is the presentation of the “airline depliant” booklet with curated pieces by critics, and there’s a really good lot of extras inside the disc too, including commentaries, interviews, music videos, essays about the legacy and origins of the films,its historical context in the mid 2000s, it’s honestly very packed even for AV’s standards.
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