Snakes on a Plane: Review

Just got back from seeing Snakes on a Plane with Mike and Kris. It was every bit as bad and brilliant as we’d hoped.

It’s unclear to me how this movie could have been watchable as a PG-13 film; the fall-off-your-chair funny scenes were the most graphic (some nudity, lots of gore). The film never takes itself completely seriously, though every once in a while it gets right up close to trying to be an actual horror movie, then it goes right back to all-out camp.

The audience was seriously into it… 45 minutes ahead of the previews starting, we had one guy walking around with a 2’ tall picture of Samuel L. Jackson’s face which elicited squeals of delight from people in the theater. Another guy was actually dressed from head to hips as a snake. And when the previews actually started, consensus formed around their relationship to the film we were about to see. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was really just “Snakes on a Farm”. Denzel Washington’s Deja Vu? “Snakes on a Brain.” You get the idea.

So the movie itself was great. I haven’t had that much fun at a movie — actually laughing at the screen, even shocked a few times at unexpected twists — in a long time. People brought rubber snakes which were repeatedly thrown around the theater. Several lines of dialogue were often completely unintelligible because people were either laughing, shouting or cheering so loudly that you couldn’t hear a thing from the movie.

All in all, a great night. Lots of fun to finally see the movie…