Snake Eater

My review was written in March 1990 after watching the movie on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

This Canadian action pic has a delightfully tongue-in-cheek quality that should appeal to video fans. Pic had a theatrical run last May, starting in Nashville.

Lorenzo Lamas of tv's "Falcon Crest" shows big screen savvy in the title role, referring to an elite search & destroy unit that he served in during his marine tenure. (His nickname, however, is "soldier", stressed in a theme song.) He works as an undercover cop for explosive boss Larry Csonka, giving the ex-football star a nice little acting role.

When geeks resembling the cast of "Deliverance" kill Lams' parents and kidnap his sister he goes on the hunt. Helping out our hero is Ronnie Hawkins, as an aging biker, and pretty Josie Bell.

Helmer George Erschbamer gets good mileage out of the biker subculture and the film benefis from a catchy musical score (integrating steel drum motifs) by John Massari. A sequel toplining Lamas has already been lensed.

Now, I've seen a lot of bad movies. I like bad movies. Especially bad action movies. I've seen (and enjoyed) all of Jean-Claude Van Damme's movies, including the one where he's his own clone, both of the ones where he plays twins, and all three where he's a cyborg. I actually own the one where he plays a fashion designer and has a fight in a truck full of durians. (Hey, if nothing else, he's got a great ass and you almost always get to see it. With DVD, you can even pause and zoom in!) That's why you can trust me when I say that this movie is so bad, it makes Plan 9 look like Citizen Kane.

Everything about Snake Eater is bad. The plot is bad. The script is bad. The sets are bad. The fights are bad. The stunts are bad. The FX are bad. The acting is spectacularly, earth-time-bendingly bad, very probably showcasing the worst performance of every so-called actor in the cast, including Lorenzo Lamas, and that's really saying something. And I'd be willing to bet everyone involved with this movie is lousy in bed, to boot. ESPECIALLY Lorenzo Lamas.

It does manage to be unintentionally funny, so it's not a total loss. However, I recommend that you watch this movie only if you are either a congenital idiot or very, very stoned. I was able to sit through it myself because I needed to watch something to distract me from rinsing cat urine out of my laundry.

It didn't help much, but it was better than nothing. One point for Ron Palillo's cameo as a gay arsonist.

The beginning of a notoriously poor and cheap B-movie trilogy for star Lorenzo Lamas, SNAKE EATER is the pits when it comes to action. It has no money at all but it tries to deliver a tight and suspenseful scenario with plenty of gravitas and fails every time. Lamas is extraordinarily wooden as a bereaved hero who goes after a gang of kidnappers and murders hiding out in the woods. There are some cool traps at the outset and some low rent kills at the climax, but in between this is mindless stuff with little to no effort made in terms of staging or originality. The acting from the cast is abominable, and that comes from someone who's seen plenty of B-cinema.

This movie's limitations in terms of acting, dialog, and plotting, are easily overcome by its consistent delivery of "entertainment value." What's more, leading man Lorenzo Lamas takes his shirt off in several scenes, baring his unshaved chest and thus significantly increasing the movie's "beefcake" factor. Curiously, there is no shot of his bare buttocks even though he strips in one scene and even though the female in this scene exposes her breasts. The only major fault in "Snake Eater" lies in its final catch-an-arsonist scene which needlessly extends the movie's running time by four or five minutes and causes it to end, disappointingly, on an anti-climactic note.

This movie has some of the worst acting that I have ever seen! Some scenes are original such as the nails coming through the floor. This nail trap catches these bad guys. The rest of the movie degrades as you go. I can't believe that this movie is not even in the bottom 100 movies of all time. I also can't believe that there are sequels! The next crap movie that I want to watch is R.O.T.O.R. Could R.O.T.O.R really be much worse than this?