What’s most annoying about this movie is that it’s basically a love story. Underlying the motive of the main character is to save the chick he loves who is trapped in her apartment and other sappy shit. Come on, when I want to see Manhattan get destroyed by a Brooklyn-Bridge-eating reptile or alien or whatever, I don’t want to have to stop to think about how Love May Conquer All. oh yeah, also, the cast members who get injured along the way seem to make miraculous recoveries a lot. That’s the Second Most Annoying Thing in Cloverfield. When I want to see hipster 20-somethings getting mauled by giant spiders and crashing in helicopters, I don’t want to see them running away from danger at top speeds in the next scene.

What I do want is to find out what kind of camera they had, because it had a spotlight, night-vision, a battery that lasts at least 7 hours, can withstand being dropped multiple times, being in a helicopter crash, nearly being eaten by a giant monster, an explosion, and being buried in rubble. I am so buying stock in whatever company made that!

This is the tale of two soldiers from Bulbovia, an imaginary Eastern Euopean country that has sent men out to civilize uncharted territory. At least I think that’s what’s going on; the font on the subtitles was really hard to read. Anyway, the soldiers tramp around through the handicapped-inaccessible forest (one dude is in a wheelchair) collecting bug samples and arguing about which species will get named after whom. After hearing the “forest speak” to him, the wheelchair-bound soldier can suddenly walk, and that’s when this film moves from “some guys with a video camera having fun in the woods” to “experimental.” (note: “Experimental” means: no-budget, but occasionally trying to be meaningful and/or artsy)

This movie doesn’t really have a plot to speak of, but it is supposedly based on a surrealist novel called Froktog by Mulnar Typsthat; at least every review of this film mentions that. However, the only thing I can find on this book are references to it through this movie. So… I did some anagrams of “Mulnar Typsthat” thinking that it sounded totally like an anagram of something and came up with “Nasal spurt myth” and “Strut Thy Napalm.” If you re-arrange “Froktog Mulnar Typsthat” altogether, you get “Prank Tart Lofty Mugshot” and “Mostly to prank truth, fag” and “try to fathom slut prank, G” Ah-HAH!

Like any good surrealist movie, things just kind of happen. I’ll just mention some of them: there’s a duel with plucked, uncooked chickens, Sasquatch and what looks like Jesus wearing a Greek theater mask frolic about in meadows, the formerly-handicapped guy (played by Wiley Wiggins, who has an awesome name) starts licking the leaves on the trees and eating the twigs, there’s a guy who wakes up with bugs crawling out of his mouth and finds an abandoned machine shop, Sasquatch and Jesus throw eggs at everyone…

In the end, I actually enjoyed this bizarre piece of filmmaking– it at least had a sense of humor about itself, and I’m totally a sucker for made-up languages.

For some reason, I thought this was going to be a sci-fi movie. Maybe I was just too excited by the picture on the video that shows Chuck Norris with his body filled in with a celestial theme. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. Anyway, this is a good-old fashioned action movie, only with a lot of talking compared to action. Much of the talking takes place in Scott (Chuck Norris), our protagonist’s head. It seems that he was trained in martial arts, was in some war, and has recurring echoing voices that try to further the plot along.

Now Scott’s left his old life behind and is… uh, I’m not sure what. He’s just militant about not going back to his old life. Meanwhile, everyone in the movie has a horrendous hairdo, including Chuck with his trademark feathered mullet, his friend A.J. with his poofy hyper-feathered David Hasselhoff-esque ‘fro, the South African dude with the poorly dyed blond bowl cut, and the Bad Guy, whose Asian Halloween wig from Spencer Gifts mullety thing is beyond description.

Central to the plot is the action. We discover that everyone Scott comes into contact with is being menaced by (inner voice talking): NINJAS… NINJAS … ninjas … ninjas. It turns out that Scott’s adopted Asian brother is running a summer-camp for training ninjas! Unfortunately, Scott’s had a feud with his brother for decades, as shown in many flashbacks, and is now his “lifelong enemy.” Scott now has a dilemma– can he kill his own brother? In all the flashbacks we see, Scott’s brother is a major dick. If my brother was that big of an asshole, I would have smacked him long ago. Anyway, Scott travels to the ninja camp, which we now discover is the Octagon in the last 15 minutes of the movie as the camera dwells on an aerial view of the compound, which indeed has 8 sides (the word “octagon” or any reference to any polyhedron is nowhere in the dialog).

There is sporadic martial arts action, throughout the film, but the ninjas don’t seem to be trained very well; Scott half-heartedly bitch-slaps them and they’re down. This film also contains a very half-hearted car chase ending in nothing being crashed, on fire, or even slightly dented. The bad guys have the good guys blocked in for a moment, then the good guys drive away while the bad guys are all like, “oopsie, we lost them!” There are also numerous attempts at humor, most of which are completely random and have no bearing on the plot. For example, Scott wants to sign up with a mercenary employer and wanders into the wrong room– one with square dance classes going on. Oops! Hilarity almost ensues! There is some sex, in the form of seeing 1/2 a nekkid booby for about 1.5 seconds, but that, plus the use of the word “shit” twice, was enough to get this cinematic gem rated R.

The main reason to watch this is because of the fact that when a white person dies, he does it very loudly and very slowly. One little blow dart to the chest can make someone dramatically thrash around while yelping in pain for several seconds. Also, watching the pussy ninjas getting picked off one by one while Chuck barely breaks a bare-chested sweat (he has to take his shirt off for some reason or another in pretty much every scene) and looks bored throughout most of the film. However, this film is very relevant today with all its talk of terrorism, funding terrorists, mercenaries, and the fur coat business. We learn an important lesson: if you want to fight terrorism, learn to speak “Slope” or “Ay-rab.”

OK, aside from the homoerotic overtones, this movie was about kicking serious ass. Blood, limbs, guts, unidentifieable body pieces flew around like confetti in most of the scenes, except when King Leonides, our protagonist, is giving speeches about freedom. For a race of people bred to be warriors (they are taking from their homes at a young age so they can prance around in diapers and learn how to handle big swords), this intangible concept is more than worth a lot of heaving and thrusting of large spears. Lest you think 300 people getting their asses kicked by Persians is an act that puts the ‘dumb’ in ‘freedom,’ history tells us that this heroic act paved the way for multiple gay discoes the Greek army to mobilize and kick those pesky Persians out once and for all. If it weren’t for them, we’d all be speaking Persian now… instead of Greek… or something.

As for the cinematic form… what can I say? The movie was visually very nice, the art direction simple, bold, and invoked a nice amount of Frank Miller’s graphic novel… but things like plot, character development, clever dialog, etc. are not necessary when you show this many elephants getting gutted and soldiers’ limbs and heads being amputated in graphic detail. It got so I was getting annoyed at the so-called ’story’, like when they’d stop fighting to talk about what was going on. MORE ASS-KICKING! I heard myself yell.

Basically, see this movie if you are into:
1. gayness
2. ass-kicking
3. see 1 & 2

Our story opens with a teenage street urchin known only as ‘K’ being held in a jail in NYC. A police officer with a comically-exaggerated limp explains that there is a website called Enola Gay that all the kids are into that teaches them everything from how to kill themselves from how to build bombs with the stuff that you find in your school’s chemistry lab. Recently, an ominous countdown to an unnamed event showed up on the site… and it’s now K’s duty to find out what it is. Coincidentally, K’s mom is being held in another jail and her trial is in 3 days. Mom will magically get out of jail if K can pose as a high school student and get to the bottom of things.

The Limpy Guy is head of the Department of Underage Agents, and it’s his duty to train and recruit nubile young girls to infiltrate high schools around Japan to find out what the sinister underworld of teenagerdom is like. The last agent he recruited ended up strapping a bomb to herself and setting it off. K, now with the new code name of Asamiya Saki, is her new replacement. Thus K is shipped to Japan and given one weapon: a deadly yo-yo which somehow manages to be concealed in a slick leather holster around her thigh, though her schoolgirl uniform is nearly impossibly-short. Of course, she isn’t taught how to use the yo-yo, which results in a couple of comic relief scenes where she smacks herself in the head while trying to use it to deliver justice.

While in school, K uncovers all the regular stuff that goes on in high schools, including popular kids who bully loner girls and teachers who turn a blind eye to it. Bullying eventually leads these kids to the Enola Gay website, where they learn the fine art of strapping empty coke bottles full of what looks like grape ginger ale to themselves and blowing themselves up. But what is the big countdown for? Here’s where I got a little shaky on the plot due to my TV being so old that the tube has shifted below the frame thus obscuring subtitles. Though I was watching the film in “English dub” mode, I couldn’t see the translation of anything that was on the students’ computer screens, which might have been central to the plot.

Meanwhile, A badass dude at school has been going around slickly giving iPod Nanos to girls. There are suitcases full of money involved, and other intrigue points. The movie culminates in an epic battle between K and her school rival in an abandoned warehouse. The two girls have somehow managed to quickly shed their school uniforms for a leather cat suit that repels bullets (but not samurai sword blades), and a blinged-out Judas Priest-esque leather outfit. There they duke it out stylishly with their killer yo-yos, yelling such fiendishly diabolical lines as “you are going to die. RIGHT NOW!” and “I’ve had enough of this SHITTY SITUATION!”

Why did the Limpy Guy go all the way to NYC to find K to do what millions of other Japanese schoolgirls could have done? You’ll find out in the end, which is moderately heartwarming as everything wraps up nicely.

If it weren’t for the fact that the entire cast was under 4 foot 7 (is that the legal height requirement? I can’t remember), this would be a pretty standard western. you have Good Guys who wear white, Bad Guys who wear black, Damsels in Distress, lynch mobs, musical numbers, barbershop quartets featuring penguins… wait, did I say penguin? Yes, for some unknown reason, during the big barbershop quartet number, the camera zooms in on a penguin. The penguin is not shown before or after that one scene in the film. WTF?

The penguin is not the only thing in this movie that makes you say a hearty “what the f was that?”, though. There’s some comedy relief in the form of a German chef, who amusingly tries to catch and cook a duck, for example. Also, the entire town of Tinytown is built to little person scale… except for a few things that provide comic relief, such as the saloon doors (the town citizens walk under them), the hitching posts for the shetland ponies that everyone rides, and of course, hilariously, the beer mugs.

However, when you think about it, someone had to build an entire set to a smaller scale. I realized this during a stagecoach chase scene (every western requires one, this movie is no different)– they even built a very small stagecoach, presumably just for this movie! I guess in those days there was no shortage (ha ha, I just made a joke worthy of this movie!) of cheap illegal immigrant labor, but still, kind of impressive.

Perhaps the filmmakers had to do something with this hackneyed plot, poor script, and clichéd score… I know, maybe nobody will notice how bad it is if we throw in a few cheesy puns and make it entirely with underemployed munchkins from The Wizard of Oz! All in all, this is a jaw-droppingly amusing movie. The novelty alone makes it well worth the rental fee. Or, since it’s so old the copyright expired, you can ususally buy it for about $3.00 (comes as a double feature with the Reefer madness rip off movie Marihuana and some Betty Boop cartoons!).

Awww, look at Shamu. He’s such a sweetie, licking little kids and jumping out of the water to smack basketballs hanging from ropes! Why do they call them “killer whales,” when they’re so darn cute? Captain Nolan (Richard Harris), an inexplicably Irish fisherman living in Canada gets to learn exactly why this is. In the wild, Shamu is a vicious, sadistic, cold, calculating killer.

Even though Rachel (Rampling), the Killer Whale expert who lectures at a local university warns him not to, Nolan decides he wants to catch an orca and sell it to an aquarium. Used to dealing in sharks, Nolan has no idea what he’s in for, and therefore needs Rachel and her stock footage to clue him in on the David Attenborough-esque details of killer whale life.

This comes in especially handy when while attempting to capture an orca, he accidentally kills a mommy and her unborn baby.

During the Wild Kingdom portion of the movie we learn that Orcas are monogamous and mate for life, they are really really smart, and they never forget a face. This last thing is the key to the rest of the movie, as Shamu hunts down Nolan and his crew, trying to chomp them.

Watch some hot Orca-on-wharf action as the pissed-off daddy orca rams the pylons that pretty much hold an entire town together! Somehow, knocking down some boathouses and wharves in the town where Captain nolan is staying Shamu manages to set fire to an entire town! You heard me. One whale. A whole town.

This is an obvious Jaws rip-off, but it’s much classier, and gorier in some parts. Jaws doesn’t get to eat entire towns, now does he? It’s worth it alone for the gratuitous use of Irish Fisherman sweaters.

It was an experience. It was an atmospheric happening. It was more than simply a movie; it was a collective adventure in cinematic exploration. The barriers between artist and viewer were smashed to a pulp from the moment we entered the theater, as the audience chanted “SNAKES! SNAKES! SNAKES!” over the pre-movie ads for washed up tv shows now running on TBS. The lights dimmed, people cheered. Previews for lame movies dragged on and on, prompting the snake-lovers to hiss, snake-like. When Samuel L.’s name appeared in the titles, joyous hissing, shouting of “SNAKES!” thundrous applause echoed through the cineplex. People cheered at everything cheer-worthy, even when the co-star pulled out a can of Red Bull someone yelled “YEAH PRODUCT PLACEMENT!” and everyone laughed and cheered. At the point in the movie where the snake containment door is counting down to when the snakes are released on the plane, the audience shouted “4… 3… 2… 1… SNAAAAAAAKES!!!” and the cheers were deafening. …And this was all waaaaaaay before Sam even got to his famous line.
The movie itself bucked most disaster movie traditions– there was no smack-worthy hysterical bitch, the old sage person was pretty funny in addition to being heroic and wise, and minimal ethnic people died, if any. It was disastrous, and yet almost parodied the genre, but without havint to resort to guitar-playing nuns and old lady Jive Translators. It was action-packed without being a soulless instant-gratification Stuff Blowing Up movie.

For the unforgettable imagery, there were gratuitous shots of nekkid boobies being attacked by snakes, a snake-on-wang induced death, snakes eating peoples’ eyes out, and even a WARNING: SPOILER small dog became a boa constrictor snack. Basically, a cinematic apex has been reached: this movie has everything. Snakes on a Plane managed to combine the most amusing, tense, and interesting formulas from both slasher movies and disaster flicks– it made you tense wondering who was going to die next (you were pretty much rooting for everyone). However, just when you were pondering the futility of humanity, and thinking about the beauty of simple survival, snakes would jump out and start maiming people and the blood would being to spatter. People don’t usually die Freddy Krueger style in disaster flicks, probably because filmmakers want to be sympathetic to the people in peril (except the obvious baddies who you know will die). Hey, the marrying of two cinematic traditions works for me!

This movie will totally be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. People already showed up to this one with stuffed snakes, ready to cheer, boo and of course hiss at opportune moments. Coming to a small college auditorium nowhere near you in 20 years– Snakes on a Plane - the Total experience. Forget the wax lips– airline hostess costumes and leis are where it’s at for the reptilian cult of the future! Take note, future Newbury Comics merchandise buyers.

Zack of course finds the dogs, and your heartstrings are tugged at a little more when you find that he can’t keep the dogs because his Bratty Sister is afraid of dogs. When she was little, she was bit by a dog, and thus has a barely noticeable scar on her eyelid which causes her to wear sunglasses all the time as she snottily dismisses the attention lavished upon her by the jocky neighbor. Zack is forced to hide the dogs, which calls for a bit of hilarity as well as more of the cockles of your heart being warmed.
At this point, your heartstrings are practically snapping as your heart is in danger of popping out of your chest.  Zack learns that the dogs heal people when he randomly walks into a doctor’s office one day and all the people in the waiting room are miraculously cured of their sniffles and coughs.

The Mom is director of a nursing home that is staffed by the nazi-esque Nurse Bleaker (Lesley Ann Warren) who doesn’t let the residents have any fun. Heartwarmingness comes in the form of a seemingly grumpy old sea captain (Charles Durning) whom Zack befriends, as well as a studly young doctor whom Mom (more than) befriends. Captain Pete agrees to watch the dogs for Zack, and of course the dogs get loose and heal all the old people, who end up having a big wild and crazy(yet heartwarming) dance party in one of the common rooms.

All the subplots intersect eventually and everyone learns a valuable moral lesson about the nature of being good with vaguely Christian overtones as the viewer’s heart is now so warm it resembles the sacrifice scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This movie is actually fairly dangerous. Although there is no sex, no bad words (unless you count “darn”), no violence of any sort, it causes heart damage. I think the American Heart Association put this movie out to keep them in business with all of the heartstring tugging and warming that goes on. I don’t think it could be any more heartwarming, in fact.

Basically: avoid this movie at all costs.