Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Calamity Of Snakes (1982) aka Ren she da zhan

3 / 5
Tagline: N/A
Directed By: William Chang
Written By: William Chang
Actors Include: Kenny Bee, Lui Cheung, Lun Kar
Genre: Horror, Action
Length: ?
Banned: I'm not sure, but I'm thinking yes
Country: Hong Kong/Taiwan

Review:
So what I knew about this film before viewing it is that this features the death of many real live snakes in a gory manner. Frankly I'm not a snake person and I like bizarro cinema so I went out of my way to find a copy (this only has 14 votes on the IMDB currently for example). This is dubbed (poorly) in English on my copy anyhow, but I hear finding one with English dub is quite a task. As exciting as this movie sounds, it's actually not that great, but if you like ridiculously camp films then you may want to give this one a try. We go to a construction site where they are about to build a brand new apartment building. For some reason in a hole they find hundreds of snakes slithering about. The solution? Chop them up with a crane, over and over and over and over and over. It's gross but monotonous. Then this "Snakemaster" puts a curse on the building, so when it's finished building the tenants are plagued with hundreds upon hundreds of snakes. Before that happens though we are plagued with some boring "character development" crap which well...doesn't belong in this sort of flick, it's only there to fill up time. After a while of being bored when the snakes do show up (when most of the building's tenants are at a roaring party none the less) attack and kill just about every one. Oh I should mention there are some freaky scenes involving some Mongoose and snakes...pretty cruel stuff here people. The pay off is there so long as you like watching snakes get killed, but I found it to be very much a one trick pony done without a ton of style or even humor. Parts are good, others not so great. I am surprised it's as obscure as it is for it doesn't necessarily deserve that but it's not a lost classic exactly either.

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