SNAKES ON A PLANE - update

Update: SNAKES ON A PLANE

I have, on several occasions, made reference to this movie. The audacity to call it "Snakes on a Plane"! What a brilliant marketing ploy! I have to give the producers credit for that.

In the interest of fairness, you should know that besides all the great movies that I recommend here, I also watch a lot of crap. Why? Because you never can judge a film until you've watched it. It's that whole - don't judge a book by its cover - thing. Last night I got around to watching SNAKES ON A PLANE on DVD and I'm here to report. Here are my observations.

1. It is INDEED about snakes on a plane.
2. That's pretty much all you need to know.

The film has all the requisite formula elements of the genre.

• Create a mission (a man who witnessed a murder must get to LA to testify against the mob boss).
  
• Establish the monster (a whole lot of venomous snakes).
  
• Somehow make them more dangerous (the bad guys distribute snake pheremones in the plane which make the snakes "hyper" aggressive - not "super" aggressive, that's not aggressive enough - no, they become "hyper aggressive).
  
• Trap them together (they're on a plane over open ocean - they can't land).
  
• Mayhem.
• A whole plethora of characters that you get to guess who is going to die, and in what order, and who will survive.
  
• Create even more suspense (who is going to land the plane?).
  
• Just when you think it's over, it's not.
  

I'm reminded of the movie Anaconda, also with a snake. I think that SNAKES ON A PLANE (SOAP) tried to copy that film (the working title during filming was "Anaconda 3" - I didn't realize they had made a "2"). But Anaconda was so bad (I would like to think - intentionally) that it was funny. SOAP, although it has its moments, is just not bad enough to be funny, and it's not good enough to be scary. There are just too many more better films to watch (or badder, funnier films) to waste time on this one. Life's short!

Conclusion: Sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover.