Rattlers

Rating:
Summary: Fangs for the Memories
Review: I give "Rattlers" 3 stars, "The Snake People" 4 stars, and the extras 3 stars.

Rattlers is just another one of the many barely distinguishable movies about humans attacked by swarms of snakes/spiders/bees/ants/frogs/etc. which came out in huge numbers in the 1970s. It has all the usual characters: the local sheriff, the good scientist, the love interest, the small-town victims, etc. Not bad as a time-waster, but this one doesn't even have the usual big-name B actor like William Shatner or Michael Caine to laugh at.

"The Snake People", which isn't even given double billing on the front cover, is not only a longer film, but far superior. It is one of several cheap Mexican films Boris Karloff made towards the end of his life (usually small, unimportant scenes filmed in L.A. sliced into the rest of the movie, filmed in Mexico). Most of these films were quite exploitative, making me wonder if Karloff knew the true contents of the rest of these films. However, this one is very tame and could easily get a PG rating. Unlike the rest of Karloff's last films, the Snake People has half decent production values (except for the titles) and is a fun movie for reasons other than its unintentional humour. This one was scripted (but not directed) by Jack Hill, who is now largely famous for being the writer and director of most of Pam Grier's hits and for being a major influence upon Tarrantino.

The Snake People is about a very professional but slighty sadistic Mexican officer arriving in a village plagued by "superstitious" beliefs about voodoo in order to clean it up. He is accompanied by Karloff's temperance worker daughter who wants to wipe out alcoholism in the town and who, despite her slogan "Lips that touch the bottle will never touch mine", falls for the handsome local police Lt. who really loves the booze. Karloff plays a local plantation owner who coincidentally studies mind-over-matter in his spare time and has books on how to use snake venom to turn people into near-dead mindless creatures, but the police fail to see anything significant in this. (But the ending does manage to make Karloff's whole role in the affair rather muddy). There is also an evil midget, a guy who wants to bring back a dead woman for his own salacious purposes, a voodoo priestess, three cannibal women, a few unimpressive zombies, and many visually striking voodoo cermonies (in one, a live chicken is beheaded). The ending (I think the director was trying to be Sergio Leone) makes little sense, but that's part of the movie's fun.

The extras on this disc aren't very strong, but they include the complete snake dance seen briefly at the beginning of every Something Weird DVD as part of their in-house ad.

Rating:
Summary: Hisssssssssssssss ...
Review: RATTLERS (1976) is a forgotten little fright film released by the ubiquitous Harry Novak that I recall playing the Drive-Ins during my youth. It failed to get an official video release, and is now winging its way to us via the good folks at Something Weird DVD! One should be warned that just because it's digital, it doesn't mean that RATTLERS is a feast for the senses: indeed, the print is brown, worn-out and ugly to the eye. In actuality, it adds to the grittiness of its barren desert setting.

We know the film has its heart in the right place when two tow-headed little boys wander from their family RV to go snooping around the Mojave Desert and fall into a bed of rattlesnakes. Ah! How trash films of this era rose to the occasion ... starting a film with the deaths of two small children whose biggest sin was taking a sip from their white trash daddy's beer! Something's not right as other citizens of the sand-swept area begin to fall prey to the slithery ones .... A farm boy goes in search of his father, finds a rattler in a hayloft and falls to his death, starting a fire. A suburban ranch house becomes inundated with writhing diamondbacks. A bitter divorcee enjoys a bubble bath when her tub becomes full of snakes (perhaps taking a cue from the "parasite rape" scene in Cronenberg's SHIVERS/THEY CAME FROM WITHIN that hit theaters the year before). The Mojave Sheriff's Department enlists the aid of a herpetologist Dr. Tom Parkinson (Sam Chew Jr.) to find out the reason behind the reptilian backlash at the princely sum of $200 a day. He's paired with photographer and Ali McGraw look-alike Anne (Elisabet Chauvet). Parkinson threatens to throw Anne's "liberated ass" back to where she came from if she doesn't change her attitude, and we know that in the movies this means they're destined to fall in love with each other. In the course of their investigation, they go to Las Vegas for a night, dance, drink and return to their desert tent for a little canoodling (what, the Shriners were holding their convention that weekend?).

There's a vague reason as to why the snakes have developed an attitude. Something about a military outpost and something buried in a mineshaft. The Colonel (Dan Priest) goes about bellowing orders, gunning down his opponents, and there's a not very big finale in the desert. There's even a "The End ... or is it?" that harkens back to the monster movies of the 1950s, of which this is a game retread.

RATTLERS is a hokey little diversion that I'm sure played the bottom half of many an ozoner. The Something Weird DVD has snake-related shorts, trailers galore (the main reason I think many people buy them) and one of Boris Karloff's last films, SNAKE PEOPLE. Hiisssssssssss ......