Freelancer Joey Shapiro has accidentally fallen in love with the horror microgenre of snake-centered B movies—or, snakesploitation cinema.
Though they may not earn themselves a spot in the Library of Congress , these magnetically strange B movies have slithered their way into the annals of my heart. As Halloween fast approaches, and with the Criterion Channel now streaming Ken Russell’s more mainstream but cartoonishly hornyas part of their 80s horror collection, there’s no better time to dive into the genre.
In many ways the original snakesploitation story is that of Adam and Eve. For the sake of brevity, though, we can fast-forward to the next most important one: 1973’s, about lab assistant David who naively trusts his snake scientist employer, Dr. Stoner, not to inject him with an experimental serum that will turn him into a snake-man.
Widely considered to be the Michael Jordan of movies about humongous killer snakes, Oliver Reed starred in not one but two snake motion pictures in the early 80s:in 1983. The former paired him with Klaus Kinski—famed for his Werner Herzog collaborations and for looking like a leather Muppet brought to life by an evil wizard—for a riff onwith a black mamba snake on the loose amidst Reed and Kinski’s hostages.
Even in their more outré moments, all of these films fall under the more conventional side of snakesploitation, the kind of movies just tasteful enough to air on TCM on a day when Ted Turner is out of the office. There is, however, a weirder, sleazier side of the micro-genre, and here is wherecomes into play. Call it advanced snakesploitation.
The true hidden gem of snakesploitation cinema though, and the one that achieves the perfect synthesis of studio polish and hysterical trashiness, is 1978’s supercharged. Everything lurid about Brian De Palma’s film is taken into maximum overdrive here: the bullies are no longer high school evil but attempted-murder evil, the unstable Christian parent is somehow even more unstable and Christian, and the eponymous teen has the power to conjure and mind-control snakes the size of Buicks.
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