Snakes on a Train review by Evan Purcell. March 29, 2016, at 7:30 a.m.
The Asylum is a production company with a very specific (and very successful) business model. Find the next blockbuster, make a cheapo rip-off with a confusingly similar name, and release it in the same week as the real thing. It’s a guaranteed recipe for success.
Don’t want to go all the way to the cinema for the latest Paranormal Activity? Why not stay at home and download Paranormal Entity instead? Wanna see the new Sherlock Holmes? The Asylum version doesn’t have Robert Downey Jr. in it, but it has giant dinosaurs! In the mood for some Transformers? Well, Transmorphers is basically the same thing, only with lesbians! This phenomenon is called “the mockbuster,” and it has spawned some of the strangest movies of the last ten years.
Every week, we’ll discuss another mockbuster, looking at the good, the bad, and all the little things that make these movies so much weirder than the original recipe. To start things off, I wanted to discuss Snakes on a Train, one of the very first mockbusters in the Asylum vault. Released on August 15, 2006, Snakes on a Train came out three days before Snakes on a Plane crashed into motherfucking theaters. It was directed by the Mallachi Brothers, which (weirdly enough) is the pseudonym of one guy named Peter Mervis.
Based on the title, I bet you can guess what this movie is about… That’s right! A Mayan curse!
Wait. You didn’t assume it was about a Mayan curse? You thought it was simply about a bunch of snakes terrorizing passengers on a train? Well, you guessed wrong. Snakes on a Train follows a Mexican couple who take a train from El Paso to L.A. so that they can get a SoCal shaman to lift a curse that makes the girlfriend spit out snakes. The snakes, of course, are pieces of her soul, and if she loses too many snakes, she’ll stop being human.
Right away, you can probably see what’s wrong about this movie. Snakes on a Plane became such a pop culture phenomenon because it had such a basic, awesome premise. You hear the title, you learn that Samuel L. Jackson is the star, and you know exactly what you’re going to get. This movie is the opposite of that. Sure, there are snakes and there’s a train, but there is so much other stuff to make everything needlessly complicated.
The Mexican couple are called Alma and Brujo. Alma keeps spitting up snakes (and green goo, because why not!) and Brujo keeps chanting in a language that is supposed to be Mayan but probably isn’t Mayan. (I’ve seen Apocalypto, and I don’t remember them talking like scatting gypsies.) They speak to each other in English, with some Spanish words sprinkled into random places. They’re illegally in the country, so they sneak into an unused train car where some gang members are also hiding. (The train car is full of empty cardboard boxes for some reason. There’s also a cage that is the perfect size for locking away dangerous criminals. It’ll probably get some use before this movie ends.)
The gang of criminals is a typical movie gang, meaning there’s one nice guy who may or may not help them by the third act. Not surprisingly, one of the criminals attacks the Mexican couple, and her snakes escape.
From there, it’s only a matter of time before the snakes start biting people, but the chaos could’ve arrived much sooner. Aside from a knife fight and repeated scenes of Alma spitting out snakes, not much happens for the first hour of the film. We meet all the passengers on this underpopulated train (some stoners, two lesbians, a businessman, a single woman, etc), but no one gets bitten for a long time. There are many, many moments of snakes crawling over people’s feet and variations of the phrase “What the hell was that?” but the danger doesn’t really kick in until the second half.
In sharp contrast to what came before, the second half of Snakes on a Train is chock full of action and gore. There’s even a shoot-out between a Middle Eastern guy and a cowboy (both narcotics officers). One gets shot in the face. One gets shot in the neck. And then they keep firing at each other! How is that even physically possible? By the time a seven-year-old gets eaten by a giant rubber snake, you know that virtually anything can happen on this train. (The seven-year-old is played by the screenwriter’s daughter, who is either the best or the worst father in Hollywood.) Oh, and did I mention that a guy gets his heart ripped out for no reason?
While all this craziness is going on, the script is sprinkled with dozens of quotable lines that make no sense out of context:
“She doesn’t have much time! The snakes are getting angry!”
“Too much of you is in the snakes.”
“She must have all her snakes back, but you can keep the ones that belong to you!”
All of these lines (and many more), come courtesy of Brujo, who must’ve really struggled to keep a straight face during the long nights of filming.
Like most Asylum movies, there’s an unnecessary lesbian subplot. In Snakes on a Train, two girlfriends are trying to start a new life in California, and one of them is smuggling cocaine. At the halfway point of the movie, the drug smuggling girlfriend has a topless scene. She’s forced into disrobing by a shady narcotics officer, so the whole scene is more uncomfortable than titillating. It marks a regressive, creepy low point in what was otherwise a dumb, harmless movie. (Well, maybe “harmless” is too strong a word, especially after a seven-year-old gets eaten.)
Everything leads to an ending that is both confusing and inexplicable. Alma (spoiler alert) turns into a giant snake (first with body paint and plastic fangs, and then with some CGI wizardry), and she starts eating the train. Thank God there were so few people on the train to begin with. Everyone dies except for six survivors, who escape from the train and cower in fear as the giant snake slithers toward them. One of the side characters uses magic to make the snake disappear, even though his magical abilities were never mentioned before. Perhaps that would’ve been useful to know before all his friends died. The snake is gone, and the survivors start the long walk to L.A. But to show the nightmare isn’t over, one of the lesbians has a bite mark on her leg. Could she turn into a snake, too? Does anybody care at this point?
The Asylum has a long tradition of absolutely insane climaxes to their movies, and this one does not disappoint. The Mallachi Brothers (again, one guy named Mervis) decided to throw logic out the window and just give us something weird. Like the rest of the movie, it’s strange and a little unpleasant, but at least it’s original.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the paradox of the mockbuster. These movies rip off anything that’s already in the cinema, but they use their borrowed titles and plots to do outrageous and unique things. They don’t have money. They don’t have movie stars. They only have weirdness. Welcome to the world of the mock buster.
Now check out Canadian bro’s Jay and the Blood Bath and Beyond guy’s review of Snakes on a Train.
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Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, always remember: “Everybody has snakes.”