Snakes on a Plane should’ve been a hit. And everyone knows following this year’s Cocaine Bear, the concept seems to benefit from the Internet. On the surface, it looked like a perfect marriage of 1970s disaster movies, most notably the Airport movies, with the When Animals Attack flicks following Jaws. It weas the type of popcorn silly horror-comedy with Samuel L. Jackson as a FBI agent trying to save a young witness to a mob murder.
And by the summer of 2006, the buzz on the movie was the type of late-night talk show jokes as well as Internet viral vibes that we’ve seen in Barbie. The fandom was there. It was the type of movie that Hollywood usually releases in the late summer months that aren’t expected to win a lot of awards yet it puts butts in seats. And following a five-day reshoot schedule to secure an R-rating and officially changing the title from the drab Pacific Air Flight 121 to its current title which was what attracted Jackson was definitely a plus.
Yet, when the movie opened on Aug. 18, 2006, it ended up grossing just $15.2 million on an whooping 3,555 screens, averaging about $4,727 a screen. And the movie wasn’t screened for critics which is another warning sign a movie may not be that good. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone dismissed it with a one-and-a-half star review. Conservative critic Michael Medved was more positive adding another star but still not fully recommended it suggesting the R-rating had kept some of the middle-school age people away. Ty Burr, of the Boston Globe, was more positive noting Jackson’s performance, but late critic Roger Ebert didn’t even review it.
The movie starts out in Hawai’i as local surfer and dirt bike racer Daniel Hayes (Nathan Phillips) is out riding his bike one day and witnesses the murder of a high-profile L.A. crime prosecutor at the hands of mob boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), who sends his associates to kill Daniel. With the help of Neville Flynn (Jackson) with the FBI, he gets away and put in protective custody to fly to Los Angeles to testify against Kim.
Kim has contacts at the Honolulu airport who put venomous snakes in the cargo area of the passenger flight. They spray pheromones on leis the passengers wear in hopes of either killing Daniel or causing the plane to crash. And since Flynn and his colleague Agent John Sanders (Mark Houghton) are in first class with Daniel, most of the people are stuck in coach much to their chagrin including the normal cast of characters that always exist in these movies.
There’s Clarence “Three G’s” Dewey (Flex Alexandar) a popular rapper who is a serious germophobe, so you know he’s going to be a problem. And there’s Troy (Kenan Thompson) who function as a bodyguard and part of his entourage. Chen Leong (Tony Chen) is a popular kickboxer and there’s also socialite Mercedes Harbont (Rachal Blanchard) and her toy chihuahua which if you’re a lover of animals, becomes snake chow when obnoxious middle-aged Paul (Gerald Plunkett) throws it at a snake to distract them.
But mostly all the other characters and passengers on the plane are your basic one-dimensional caricatures and potential victims. Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies) is the main flight attendant who helps Flynn. Lin Shaye pops up as Grace, an aging flight attendant who should’ve retired already. Geuss what happens to her?
The snakes are released from their enclosure and start to move through the plane seeking out the passengers with the phermonones attacking a couple trying to make the mile-high club in the restroom and attacking the pilots. So a lot of people are bitten and die while others are on a time schedule as Flynn works with his colleague, Henry Harris (Bobby Canavale) in L.A. to locate the best snake expert they can. At about an hour and 45 minutes with credits, it’s a very detailed movie that has a lot of things happening.
And maybe that was it’s problem. Kim appears in only two scenes earlier in the movie and just forgotten. With Harris seeking the help of Dr. Steven Price (Tony Louiso) it feels like a different direction as they move away from the incidents on the plane. One has to wonder why Kim would go to so much lengths just to kill one witness? In the post-9/11 world, wouldn’t there be an air marshal on board as well?
Maybe it was so close to 9/11 that audiences stayed away. United 93 had opened in late April but still managed to be a bigger hit despite some people feeling it was too soon. But this is intended to be a silly movie. Yet maybe even five years after 9/11, people didn’t find too much humorous about snakes stopping a couple from having sex or fighting a man’s member on an airplane.
Or maybe there were way too many characters to care about. Thompson seems wasted for most of the movie before having to assist in the landing of the plane. And even Daniel’s character seems to just sit around much in the background. Yet despite all this, it’s a perfect B-movie with A-listers. Jackson said he made the movie because it’s the type of thing he would’ve gone to as a child to see.
But for some reason, it seems they went overboard with the excessive violence. A passenger gets impaled accidentally in the ear with a high heel stiletto during a panic. Another passenger’s neck is impaled with a metal rod and it gushes blood. People who have been bitten by snakes foam at the mouth and twitch their bodies. It all feels like overkill, pardon the pun. You can tell these scenes were added and other scenes were cut to keep the run time still around the 100-minute mark.
This might explain why Phillips and Thompson seem to spend time in the background and the whole subplot with Agent Harris and Dr. Price seems to more of less result in a “Yadda Yadda Yadda” pacing and they quickly find a character who is working with Kim and has all the antivenin they need. The additional outrageous violence and sex kinda make it feel like a Troma movie with its tone and style.
And there’s the rub. Blockbusters and cult classics are two different entities. Sure, a cult classic can make money but it can’t be a runaway success. Snakes grossed about $62 million worldwide against a $33 million budget. Jackson’s line “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” has earned the movie some popularity as Jackson has become more famous over the Internet for using that dirty word. Jackson also famously dubbed a TV-edit version that has him say, “I’ve had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!”
The absurdity of the TV-edit has earned the movie even more cult status. The CGI of the snakes is typical for the mid-2000s but most movies released during the decade weren’t that well made. It looks like a lot of people on the production had a lot of fun making it and if you really want a goofy-horror movie, this is in the vein of flicks like Lake Placid, Sharknado and Cocaine Bear. Sometimes, horror is so silly, you have to laugh at it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 