I have got to say up front that this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. A gazillion CGI snakes couldn't eat all the cheese that made up this film. It felt like the abandoned love child of Quinn Martin and Irwin Allen, a misbegotten mash-up of an old Hawaii Five-O episode and some seventies disaster flick. It is not merely that the movie failed to live up to the incredible Internet buzz that it had generated: it is a genuinely bad movie, a film which, even if screened for members of an alien race with no knowledge of earth culture, would still be recognized as awful.
That said, we had a great time. The student leaders who put on the show were all dressed as members of an airline crew and greeted people as if we were coming on a plane; they even pushed a beverage cart down the aisle to hand out free pop (along with the free snacks). The crowd was in a good mood, and everyone screamed as snakes attached themselves to various body parts and cheered as FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson muscled his way through the film by pretending he was actually in a real movie. Our favorite line was not the much-quoted signature line, but Agent Flynn's response when told pheromones were making the snakes aggressive: "That's good news; snakes on crack." Maybe because the night was such good craic.
Aside: This isn't the first bad snakes-in-an-enclosed-place thriller. Check out Fer-de-Lance, a 1974 TV movie starring David Janssen and Hope Lange (!), about poisonous snakes menacing a submarine.
