Mega Snake

This promotional image is lying to you. There are no tumbling skyscrapers, no jet fighters, and no helicopters in Mega Snake. The snake is not 500 feet tall. Feedback is, in fact, not "featured" in the film, but he only makes an appearance for 5 minutes. What do we have then? A Sci-Fi Original movie that succeeds in being entertaining.

We're introduced to two brothers from a family of religious snake handlers in a small town. Ambulance driver Les Daniels has grown up with a fear of snakes ever since his father was killed at a church while snake handling. His older brother Duff Daniels has followed the family tradition of snake handling and constantly berates Les about his fear of snakes. In need of new deadly snakes for his church, Duff visits Cherokee snake salesman Screaming Hawk. The salesman refuses to sell him a mysterious snake encased in a jar, telling him that it's a mythical snake that killed his ancestors and must never be released. Screaming Hawk tells him that there are three rules for the snake, "Don't let it out. Don't feed it. Don't fear the heart of the snake." Duff decides to steal the snake, and accidentally releases it once he gets home. As all three of Screaming Hawk's rules are broken throughout the rest of the film, the snake begins feeding on the citizens of the town, growing from a mere 12 inches to a gargantuan size, and wreaking havoc upon the town.

There's some conflict points in the film that it attempts to address. Les and Duff have the usual brother issues over the death of their father. Les is in a love triangle with his girlfriend Erin and a controlling cop named Bo. And as usual, once Les and Erin figure out that a snake is on the lose, the authority in the town doesn't believe them until "it is too late." These really take a backseat, though, to the main focus of the film: The Mega Snake.

The snake is sloppily rendered in CGI, looking like a monster out of a big budget Hollywood film from 1999. This works to the benefit of the film. This hearkens back to such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, where the protagonists are stabbing at something that clearly was put into the film post-production. Regardless of it's authenticity, we're privy to the snakes mayhem. And trust me, no one is spared. We cheer for the little guy as he grows into a behemoth and an audience favorite. During the course of the film, entire families are eaten, including children. Dogs and cats are gobbled up like snacks. And in an amusing turn of events, an entire section of people on an amusement park ride are beheaded in one swoop. Most of the violence in the film is comically over the top, and this makes it an enjoyable movie to watch with friends. As a straight to video release, this is definitely a good rental film to sit down with some popcorn and enjoy.

Alien vs. Hunter

This movie is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad. One of the worst films I have ever seen, and I've seen some awful films in my lifetime. I generally try to compile a list of reasons during the film, things I can write about, and I am not kidding when I say that I lost count 15 minutes into this horrible piece of shit.

Alien vs. Hunter was most likely the brainchild of a seventh grader at a local junior high school. The kid was reading some comic books, and he decided that he wanted to write a cool story for a school assignment:

Billy

7th Grade


Some aliens land in a small mountain town. There's a hunter who has this huge rifle, and he shoots stuff with it but he misses a lot. The alien is half alien from the movie aliens and the other half is a spider. There is a man who writes for the papers and he and this girl run from the aliens with some other people. The hunter with the huge rifle chases the people around and he shoots at them also at the alien. Some of the people die because they get shot and also the alien eats them a lot. Then the people find the alien ship and they find one of his guns and they shoot the alien and it dies. The end.

And after Billy finishes this, he shows it to his father. His father is a broken down director who is desperately trying to feed his cocaine and hooker habit. He sees dollar signs after reading Billy's assignment, and pats him on the head. "Good job, son," he says, dreaming of the drug-fueled sex binge he's going to go on after he directs this straight to video shitter. The dad asks him what the hunter is supposed to look like. Billy draws him a picture of a scuba diver in a samurai outfit.


"Thanks, son!" the father says. The father then directs the film straight from the handwritten essay, without developing it into a feature length screenplay.

There are three locations in this film: Rooms in someone's house, the forest, and the sewers. The same identical sets and shots are repeatedly used. The hunter, the samurai scuba diver, is the worst shot I have ever seen. He frequently misses everyone with his laser rifle (which actually goes "pew-pew"), not to mention he appears in about five total minutes of the film. When he does, repeated stock footage of the alien is shown through his "hunter vision," he runs off, and we're taken back to the main cast of humans.

And oh god, the humans. The progenitors of the most hackneyed, contradictory, and suicide-inducing prose ever spoken in modern cinema. I rarely literally cringe during a film, but this film had me clutching my stomach and desperately reaching for something to stab myself in the throat. It became more than a film-watching experience. It was like getting a cramp during the middle of a marathon. Every muscle in my body was telling me to quit, but I just had to see if I could make it through. And I did. I made it through to the anti-climatic, twist-attempting, incredibly demented ending. Had I a handgun at the ready, I would not be alive to write this review today.

Ideological Formalism and the Sci-Fi Original

I've recently begun reading more on formalist theory and filmmaking. It's become obvious that ideological formalism, the idea that the classical Hollywood editing style is the way it is to appeal the most to to the audience and to earn the most profit, holds much truth. This is also evident in the Sci-Fi Original. For those unaware, the Sci-Fi Originals are a collection of quickly produced low budget monster or horror films produced or purchased excusively for the Sci-Fi network. These films typically have names like "Boa vs. Python" or "Frankenfish" and hearken back to the days of true B-movies.

Ideological Formalism is different from Auteur Theory of formalism in one key area: motivation. Ideological Formalism is the idea that it is not the director's own personal motivations and experiences that drive the film (such as in Auteur Theory) but the socio-economic and human pressures around him. In this sense, Sci-Fi originals embody Ideological Formalism in it's purest sense.

These films are mass produced, coming out at an astonishing rate of once each week, for a Saturday night premiere on the Sci-Fi network. They require small budgets of only one million to two million. The pressures put on them to keep the costs down greatly influence the filmmaking process. By releasing direct to DVD or a cable network, the filmmakers avoid the extensive costs of film processing. The films often have a basic set, such as a city, a jungle, or a desert. They often star almost all unknown actors, or at the most an actor with few major film credits such as Robert Beltran. Rarely, famous "B-movie" actors are cast in films. Stephen Baldwin, being an example, has starred in numerous straight to video or television films shown on the Sci-Fi channel.

The "monster" is the major draw for the film. The filmmakers need to come up with something original, yet amusing enough to retain the camp that is present in all of these films. Each film strives to be more over the top than the previous one, in order to grab the ratings on Saturday night. This is why sequels, spinoffs, or cliches will frequently occur. For example, "Boa vs. Python" was released in 2004. Since then, the snake meme has perpetuated in the Sci-Fi original film library. Following "Boa vs. Python" has been "Snakehead Terror" (2004), "The Snake King" (2005), "Fire Serpent" (2007), "Mega Snake" (2007), "Vipers" (2008), "and "Copperhead" (2008). This is one of many of the frequent memes present in Sci-Fi Original films. The filmmakers are heavily influenced by the success and ratings of the films. They will keep producing different snake films until it stops being profitable.

Ideological Formalism isn't a bad thing. To put it quite simply, it shows that we're influenced by external factors much of the time. It's clear that these filmmakers are producing these films for the ratings, and audiences respond well to that. Audiences aren't always looking for pure art in film, otherwise Michael Bay would be out of a job (...zing). Until the ratings shift in the other direction, Sci-Fi Original filmmakers will keep bringing us giant mythological creatures attacking a rag-tag band of adventures each week, and we'll keep enjoying watching them.

Splinter

The Body Horror genre has long been a niche with one dominating force: David Cronenberg. He firmly established himself as the figurehead of body horror with such films as Rabid, The Fly, and Videodrome. The reason that Cronenberg's films work so masterfully in this genre is due to the focus on the paristitic infection, the invading alien element, as the main antagonist in the film. The fear that is brought about when someone is transformed against their will into something inhuman, when someone is violated (and definitely with sexual metaphors in many of Cronenberg's films) and their body is taken over. Cronenberg's success in this genre has, in a large way, laid the framework for how a successful body horror film must be written.

Splinter is a film about a group of four people that end up being trapped in a gas station in the middle of nowhere. The attacking force originally appears to be a reanimated corpse of a gas station attendant, covered from head to toe in strange splinters. The splinters reveal their true nature early on in the film, as a parisitic force that takes control of its infected host.

The “splinter” effects in the film, or when a character in the film is taken over by the parasite, are done remarkably well for the budget. The antagonists, the infected "splinter" bodies, move with a series of jerky, primal movements, captured with quick handheld shots. We don't see much of the monster, but we see enough that it works well as an agent of fear. This is a notable but common tactic that has worked well in other successful horror films, most notably Alien (I should mention that Alien is one of the few non-Cronenberg films that is championed in the Body Horror genre). When we don't see the monster in it's entirety, our imagination tends to fill in the rest of the horrific details. The shots in the film are done in an extremely shallow depth of field, and this adds to the claustrophobic feel as the characters are trapped in a 20ft square room for most of the film.

This film fails on two fronts. When a script limits itself to a handful of characters for the majority of the film, the film is shouldered upon these few characters. They have to be strong in order to bear this burden. This comes in the form of strong acting, strong dialogue, and strong character development. If this doesn’t happen, it definitely gets noticed. In Splinter, we meet a cast of stereotypes and hypocrisies. The initial ineptness of the city-folk couple is expected, but they seem to grow a surprisingly large pair by the end of the film. And the convict who hides a heart of gold? Strangely enough, the couple he kidnapped must have realized that fact before the audience, because they seemed quite willing to save his life immediately after having a gun pointed at their face.

Like the fates of most horror films, this one rises and falls on the success of the monster. As I mentioned earlier, the fear in Body Horror films is on the infection; the invasion of the body by a mysterious and deadly force. This film barely touches the surface of what could have been explored on this subject. One character finds themselves “splintered,” and this fact seems to stay quiet for most of the film. The director chooses, instead, to have the fear be directed outwardly towards an antagonist keeping the group trapped inside the gas station. The problem, in this case, is that the director isn’t presenting the horror for what it is: a parasitic infection. If you keep the infection at bay for the entire film, and you don’t present it as an invading force within the protagonists, then you’re ignoring the fear that a body horror film can bring to the audience. Had the director explored this more, Splinter could have been much more successful. This isn’t a bad film, but an enjoyable scary flick that reminds you of what it could have been.