Snakes on a Plane: B Movie Perfection

Certainly after all the online hype and laughter about Snakes on a Plane, everyone wondered if the movie could possibly live up to our wild imaginings. Amazingly, Snakes on a Plane does. This, of course, doesn’t mean Snakes on a Plane is actually any good. Rather, Snakes on a Plane is a self-indulgent, note-perfect, absurdist B movie which features:

– snakes
– snakes killing lots of people
– lots of people killing snakes
– a dog named after an Olsen twin getting fed to snakes
– snake-o-vision
– “snakes on crack!”
– gratuitous nudity
– snakes biting all sots of places you don’t ever want to think about
– snakes slithering in and out of bodies
– snakes attempting to mate with leis
– a ridiculous backstory involving the Korean mafia
– a terrible music video by a band called Cobra Starship

Snakes on a Plane succeeds because it is well-paced and takes itself extremely seriously, while also knowing exactly what it is – a movie intentionally designed to be so bad it has to be good. Also fun is the degree to which Snakes on a Plane manages to capture the horror or airtravel before the snakes come out – every cliche and stereotype in the book is here including the assumed to be gay male flight attendent, the sexist pilot, the kids travelling alone, the young mother with a baby, the neurotic celebrity, an irritable British fellow and so forth and so on.

Samuel L. Jackson and the rest of the cast clearly had a great time shooting Snakes on a Plane, although one must wonder about the audition process. “It’s a cobra. Scream! Okay, now a rattler. Scream!”

While Snakes on a Plane doesn’t have a lot of blood (snake bites being small puncture wounds), it does manage to be incredibly gross and gory. And while you would expect to see intense ugly, vengeful ends for the snakes – the human deaths are much grislier. Pet lovers should note that both a dog and a cat turn into snake food (the dog more graphically than the cat) in the course of Snakes on a Plane.

The true question, of course, is what will the sequel be? More Snakes on a Plane? Snakes on a Bus? Aligators on a Plane?

Either way, Snakes on a Plane is so awesomely bad that is has the potential to replace The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a late-night participatory movie experience, complete with sing-alongs-commentary and audience performance.

Really.