Since we took the opportunity to review Snakes On A Plane some time ago for the movie 20th anniversary and the 4K UHD Bluray rerelease by Arrow Video meant to celebrate that, i guess it’s inevitable we cover the mockbuster version the Asylum cooked up the same year, as in, Snakes On A Train.
I mean, why not, i got the UK DVD release for peanuts years ago, might as well.
As with most of their mockbusters, the plot is legally distinct from the movie whose cottails they’re riding on, and just shares the same idea/copies the same gimmick, this time a public transport vehicle being filled with killer snakes, a train in this occasion as it’s cheaper to shoot.
In a way, this should have been a really fuckin easy one.
Snakes On A Plane was already a relatively big budgeted B-movie that happened to have Samuel L. Jackson and was released in cinemas, so someone cooking up a cheaper knock off out of it makes perfect sense, almost poetic parasitism if you will.
But leave to the Asylum to somehow fumble even this, to trip on their own shoelaces.
Which makes for some really fascinating (at least to shit seeking cinema buffs) incompetence, but also some of the most boring shit the company ever gargled together as a finished product.
Especially considering how they managed to make boring a movie about a fuckin woman who keeps vomiting snakes due to a curse, and how these snakes end up on a train, as her husband helped her contained the curse but now they need to reach Los Angeles, where a powerful shaman can cure her of the curse, so they illegaly board the train.
As criminals on the train attack them and the situation gets worse, the snakes get wandering and killing the… very few passengers aboard the train, which include a subplot about criminals searching for a bag of coke a girl smuggled in, and other characters not even worth mentioning to take the piss out of.
It takes some inverse skill to have a movie still be boring as fuck even if you have scenes like a man ripping off another guy’s heart Killua style just so he can retrieve a tiny snake, and make it look like the scenes are contractiding themselves, even when they are not, of such such quality is direction.
Not that anything explains how the curse turns the man’s wife into a snakewoman and how her chugging down the snakes she spat/vomited out before…. turns into a giant snake that swallows the train whole, aside from the fact the DVD cover showed that happening.
Or how the random guy that was nice to the couple somehow instantly knows how to use a Mayan artifact to do some incomprensible magic shit that whisks away into thin air the giant snake.
I will give it some credit for them using actual snakes (before they have to switch to the PS1 era CG ones) most of the film, even if they’re more little and cute than anything, the gore it’s not that bad considered it’s the Asylum and some moments of hilarity are there, like the wounded sheriff and assassin not even aiming the prop guns correctly, as they know the muzzleflash would be added in post, and that slinging cheap racist slurs at each others hurts them more than a fake bullet would.
But i will subtract those points since they somehow use CGI for a transition of the train moving…. why i dunno, since they already did shots of the train before, hence proving they didn’t need to CGI for a 4 second sequence of a moving train. But they did anyway.
Even disregarding that bit, the accidentally funny bits are nowhere near enough to make Snakes On A Train a movie so bad it’s simply that, bad, pathetic, cloying, and – most importantly – not really entertaining, feeling like a slog even with its 87 minutes + credits runtime, not it actually matters that some of the actors are actually trying, for what its worth some are, but still, it’s about as well acted as you could expect.
Gotta love how it sequels baits but oddly the Asylum never followed that up.
Which is strange since they did spun out their own Titanic series and even a “9/11” themed disaster film, but for whatever reason not this one they never dared touch again.
And in a way, i get why, i think.
While before they already were doing mockbusters like King Of The Lost World (to leech off the 2005 King Kong remake), Snakes On A Train was the first one to make them some cash and properly put them on the map as the cheapest bootleggers in town, ready to turn nothing down for a buck, to the point they made it an important plot point of 2025 Armageddon, a 2022 film of theirs that is an excuse to sell their own self deprecating nostalgia of themselves in a meta-context, since the leads of that film remember watching Snakes On A Train together because their grandma accidentally got them that DVD instead of the “real one” with Samuel L. Jackson.
And that’s how they realize the aliens’ plan, but i already did review that one, so in short they do consider Snakes On A Train as a nostalgic foundational pillar for the company, but for anyone else i’d skip it because it’s notably boring, even for shitseeking bad movie buffs it’s a waste of fuckin time that is both bad and not really entertaining even in a “so bad it’s good way”.
This is one of those cases where i’d still recommend just watching the ending on Youtube, even if you can find the whole thing uploaded on there, as of now.
While there was no Snakes On A Train 2, someone decided to reheat this pile of fried shit 12 years later, in the wake of Sharknado for stuff like Snake Outta Compton…which i just realized i will eventually have to review instead of having it not squatter about in a tiny corner of the “to do later” list inside my brain.
Maybe i will just forget about it all together and never review that one, hopefully.
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