I don't know why, but seeing that legless chap and seeing houses start to put out their Halloween stuff reminded me of one of the most lousy horror movies I have ever seen. I'll put it this way: I saw it on TV when I was pretty young and it didn't scare me in the least. Dumbo scared me with the Pink Elephants on Parade; Willy Wonka scared the snot out of me; but this?
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Forget it.
The film is 1973's Sssssss (there should be seven S's; if you've written eight, leave off the last S for savings!). They should have called it Zzzzzzz.
The plot, per Rotten Tomatoes:
Short on cash, undergrad David Blake (Dirk Benedict) takes a job working as a lab assistant for snake expert Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin). When Stoner begins giving David a series of antibiotics as a safeguard against snakebites, he at first thinks nothing of it. But gradually David begins to notices curious changes in his body, and his new girlfriend, Dr. Stoner's daughter, Kristina (Heather Menzies), notices them too. Could Dr. Stoner really be trying to turn his assistant into a snake?
Ya think?
Even if you didn't know this was supposed to be a creepy film going in, by 1973 any Strother Martin role could be identified as a loon with 100% accuracy. So, knowing right away what the movie was about and how dumb Dirk Benedict's guy had to be to make it work, it was just a ssssssslow ssssssslog toward the conclusion. There were dream sequences and whatnot that were creepy but not frightening, and I confess that at the age I saw this the riveting sexual tension between David and Kristina was lost on me if it was there at all. But I watched it with my dad, whose review was basically "What the hell is all this?" and "That was a waste of time."
The movie has its defenders. The Stranger blog says "Your patience is more than rewarded in the final third of the film, when David starts going full snake. The makeup is incredible, done by John Chambers who is best known for his work on Planet of the Apes." It does stand out in my memory, so I'll give it that. But others on RT say "Too stupid and mean-spirited to be amusingly bad," and "I've seen worse films, but maybe if it was just balls-to-the-wall awful, I would've been hootin' and hollarin', instead of yawnin' and snorin'. It's just plain forgettable," and, concisely, "Hisssssssssss".
I have a friend who has a snake phobia, and I suppose this film would have driven him from the theater. While I have a healthy respect for snakes that might pose a danger, they don't particularly scare me, and didn't as a kid. There were more chills in Chuck Jones's adaptation of "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi."
So those are some snake thoughts for the day. What've you got to sssssssay?
1 comment:
I knew a snake family so poor they did not have a pit to hiss in.
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