Snakes on a Train (2006) Review

WEEK 2: SLITHERING SERPENTS 

Snakes on a Train (2006) Review

The Asylum is the film studio I hate the most, without contention. They are infamous for cashing in on the success of other films with micro-budget, Z-grade productions that require little to no effort and demand little to no respect. When Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake hit theatres in 2005, Asylum made King of the Lost World: my most-hated film of all-time. When Michael Bay’s Transformers became super popular, they made Transmorphers. To counter Pacific Rim, they had Atlantic Rim. And of course, when Samuel L. Jackson had enough of those motherf**kin’ snakes on that motherf**kin’ plane, Asylum conjured up Snakes on a Train. This movie literally had everything going against it, so my expectations going in were as bottom of the barrel as possible. While I wasn’t thrilled with what I saw, I’m just relieved it wasn’t as bad as King of the Lost World.

The plot (yes, it has one of those) is about a Mexican couple who sneak across the poorly-guarded border and hop on a train, because the woman is ill and needs the help of a shaman in Los Angeles. The Mexican guy performs a weird ritual act with a pipe and smoke blowing and stuff, and the girl pukes up green jello, along with a garter snake. Turns out she’s full of poisonous vipers, so they stow away on the train with some other Mexicans—unbeknownst to the ticket guy, of course, who welcomes aboard the rest of the passengers.

As the passengers get on the train, the quality of the movie begins to decline (and no, it doesn’t go back up), but it doesn’t become unwatchable. The characters are all pretty much stock characters—there’s the hot girl who’s only there to show her boobs, the stoner kids, a nervous businessman trying to hit on the girl sitting across from him (he mentions he hates planes at one point, which almost made me laugh)—but there are a couple fairly unusual individuals, like a narcotics officer dressed as a cowboy and a mysterious foreign dude who stalks the two hot girls, but it’s never explained who he was or why he was doing so.

For being simply a cash-in on Snakes on a Plane, a movie I didn’t really love to begin with, I have to hand it to the guys behind Snakes on a Train for coming up with (and I’m being generous here) a moderately original story. Aside from the reptiles on a means of transportation commonality, Snakes on a Train is pretty much completely different. There’s something supernatural going on with the woman full of snakes, one of the hot girl’s is smuggling drugs, the Mexicans are revolting against the snake woman’s partner, and poisonous snakes are infesting the train. It’s a totally insane plot, sure, and it doesn’t make much sense at all, but still, points for originality. I also found it commendable how they tackled the low budget. Nearly the entire movie takes place on the train, which was a smart way to conserve money, and while this is evidently low budget, they put the effort in to stretch the budget as far as possible. If only they had put in a little more effort into some other things...

The DVD cover says “100 Trapped Passengers...3,000 Venomous Vipers!” 1) There are nowhere near that many snakes in the movie. 2) Only garter snakes and ball pythons are on the train, no vipers. 3) There are maybe a dozen passengers at most. Also, while the train’s interior remains the same from beginning to end, the exterior changes several times. It’s obvious they didn’t have much access to stock footage of a train moving on train tracks, as made most obvious in a fight scene early on, where one guy tries to push another off the train, and instead of cutting to a shot of the fast moving ground or the guy leaning away from a train or an exterior shot of any kind, there’s a bizarre overlap shot of moving train tracks for a split second that fades in and out. What’s more bizarre is it happens multiple times in the same fight scene.

Snakes on a Train is bad in two main ways. In one way, it’s bad like many other killer snake movies are bad (obvious rubber snakes used, non-lethal snakes used, same old stuff) but then it’s also bad in a way that’s almost worse: it’s boring. This movie is really slow, and the action happens in spurts, but it’s not totally devoid of anything worth seeing. There’s actually more blood and gore in Snakes on a Train than in Snakes on a Plane, and one scene where a snake goes up a guy’s wrist is pretty sick. There’s a lot of generic stuff wrong with this movie that’s wrong with the majority of made-for-TV movies, and it gets really trashy at times (one scene makes it feel more like a soft-core porno than a killer animal film), but ultimately, it just doesn’t have enough awesome action to really make it worthwhile. The whole time I was hoping the snake woman would explode with snakes; of course she didn’t. BUT, something does happen at the end, and it needs to be spoiled.

Some people might call the ending the best part; others might say it’s the worst. I thought it was amazing. The woman turns into a giant snake and eats the train, then is sucked up into a magical portal and disappears. Please, take a moment for that to sink in. If you’ve ever seen screen tests for cgi characters in movies, you might have seen the pre-viz shots, where there’s a blocky grey shape used to represent the character and movement, before any detail or colour is added. That’s pretty much what the snake looks like. I thought I had seen it all when it came to bad cgi effects, but lo and behold, this is up there with the worst ever. I implore you to find that one short scene on YouTube and watch it.

Snakes on a Train is one of the worst snake movies ever, but maybe not the worst, and definitely not the worst Asylum mockbuster. While I didn’t hate watching it, there’s not much that’s exciting, nothing scary, nothing real funny, and apart from a few scenes (mainly the final one), not much else to see.