Editorials
‘Snakes on a Plane’ and the Simple Pleasures of Silly Horror Movies
In 2006, a trailer was released for a crazy little movie that caused the entire internet to collectively shit its pants. That little movie was Snakes on a Plane. Yes, the title says it all. A herd of angry snakes was going to be attacking passengers mid-flight, with only Samuel L. Jackson to save them all from certain destruction and death. Naturally.
It was a movie the likes of which we had never seen on the big screen before. So blunt. So exciting. So ridiculous. Bring it on! The memes, the jokes, the mentions and the excitement were on full display awaiting the film’s August 2006 opening.
And then…nobody saw it.
What had started out as a wave of internet buzz died at the box office and the world moved on to something else. Which is stupid, because I’m here to tell you that Snakes on a Plane is a damn fun movie. And a lot of that comes from the fact that director David R. Ellis didn’t set out to make something revolutionary. Snakes is a silly B-movie and knows it’s a silly B-movie. It knows what the audience wants and what we’re there to see.
We get a basic set up – nothing too complicated or grandiose. We start in Hawaii, where surfer Sean (Nathan Phillips) finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and sees mega mobster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) murder the district attorney who has been building a case against his crime ring. Shawn is quickly intercepted by FBI agent Neville Flynn (Jackson), who convinces him to fly to Los Angeles to testify against Kim at his upcoming trial. Kim, the criminal mastermind that he is, puts a shit-ton of snakes in the cargo hold of the plane and rigs their boxes to open mid-flight. To make his plan even more dastardly, he also soaks a bunch of flowers with snake pheromones and sticks them in the cargo hold as well, making the snakes extra aggressive and super pissed off.
That’s it. We get the snakes on the plane, and then we try to survive the snake attacks until we can land the plane safely in L.A. Simple? Yes. Genius? Absolutely – in that balls-out, totally silly, William Castle-y kind of way.
Because we’re not here for mystery. We’re not here for a complex crime thriller. We’re here because we want to see a bunch of passengers attacked by snakes at thirty thousand feet.
And that is exactly what Ellis delivers. When the snakes are released, it’s practically like he yells “Game On!” from somewhere off-camera. We get snakes in vomit bags. In toilets. Falling out of the ventilation system. Crawling under the chairs. Popping out of the instrument panel and attacking our pilot. They bite every body part imaginable. Taylor Kitsch has an unfortunate experience when he tries to bang his girlfriend in the bathroom. One lady gets bitten in the eyeball. Some other dude gets bitten on the dick.
The list goes on, and because horror fans are a deliciously evil breed of audience, we cheer.
And that’s not even including what happens when the passengers begin to fight back. Snakes are tasered, smashed, burned and microwaved. Massive carnage ensues. Lin Shaye saves a baby. We continue cheering.
Along the way, the passengers are, of course, presented with an increasingly difficult series of challenges that must be overcome – leveling the plane when the co-pilot becomes incapacitated, getting the ventilation system reset, sucking the poison out of small child’s snake bite and relying on a gamer played by Kenan Thompson to land the plane when nobody else can.
Snakes on a Plane works because it is a gleeful film that is more than happy to deliver the goods. It embraces its silly premise and leans in hard. There’s something magic about that. It’s a film that begs for popcorn and beer and lots of laughs and cheering. It’s a film that was made to be fun. Full stop.
And it all ends with a bitchin’ video from Cobra Starship. What else do you want?
So yes, Snakes on a Plane was a box office failure, but really, that’s because the audience failed it. Now more than ever, we can really appreciate fun when it heads our way, and if you missed the opportunity to see this entertaining movie, maybe it’s time to remedy that and give it the love that it deserves. Because some things are more than just a ridiculous meme.
Snakes delivers tons of fun in exchange for a mere 90 minutes of your time. It’s a win-win.
I’m relatively new to the Bloody Disgusting family, but I feel the need to admit something that you might find disturbing, distasteful, and downright disappointing. Basically, and with the utmost respect for your feelings, I’m of the opinion that Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the best entry in the entire franchise.
To be clear, I like Sam Raimi’s original trilogy well enough, especially 1987’s Evil Dead II, but the zaniness can’t help but neuter the horror for me. They’re fun movies! I’m entertained by them, but I’m just drawn to Alvarez’s meaner, gorier, and more tonally unrelenting take on the same material.
A new Evil Dead film is now in theaters, and just as 2023’s Evil Dead Rise followed this same brutal vibe, Evil Dead Burn is continuing that wet slide into utter carnage.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Evil Dead (2013)
Commentators: Fede Alvarez (director/co-writer), Rodo Sayagues (co-writer), Jane Levy (actor), Lou Taylor Pucci (actor), Jessica Lucas (actor)
1. The family watching in the basement at 3:11 includes producer Rob Tapert’s son and a local actor from New Zealand, the one with the disfigured face, who has survived two separate plane crashes.
2. The decision to flip the opening shot (post title) upside down came in editing as Alvarez recalled being unsettled by a shot from Raimi’s original Evil Dead. “Something that really impressed me about the original was all the camera work, and there’s a moment… where Bruce [Campbell] runs from one side of the room to the other, and the camera looks back and upside down.”
3. It was composer Roque Banos who came up with adding the siren sounds. His inspiration came after living in Los Angeles for a short time and hearing many, many sirens.
4. It was Pucci’s idea for his character, Eric, to have a beard and long hair – partly as a visual nod to the film’s 1970s vibe, and partly because “you never have to do anything” with it.
5. “In any good story you have one of the main characters taking a bad step in the beginning,” says Alvarez as David (Shiloh Fernandez) fails to simply turn around and apologize to his sister Mia (Levy). “He makes another mistake,” adds Levy when he ignores her pleas for help after she’s been assaulted by the tree, but Alvarez says that choice is far more understandable.
6. Pucci is asked if it was his choice to be playing with the deck of cards on the porch swing, but he says it was Alvarez’s suggestion. The director adds that he had just tried impressing Pucci with a card trick – turns out they’re both amateur magicians – and Pucci carried it into the scene. It’s also a nod to the original film.
7. The clock at 14:56 is the actual one from the original film.
8. Most of them agree that the blood would send them packing in real life well before the book would. They’d be curious about the latter.
9. “It smells like burnt hair” was improvised by Pucci.
10. The script called for dead crows in the basement, but Tapert suggested they try something different, so they went with cats. A dead one had been found “in an alley” somewhere, and they took a mold of it to craft additional prosthetic cat corpses.
11. All of the closeups of people touching the book feature Alvarez’s hands.
12. Mia’s front yard vomit consisted of cold soup.
13. Early scenes of a wet and angry Mia were preceded by her doing sprints or jumping jacks offscreen to make her seem more exasperated. She was so amped up while driving the car that Alvarez, who was hidden in the backseat, was scared “while Jane is going crazy.”
14. Levy recalls Alvarez suggesting a similar scene from Wild at Heart as a reference point for her own performance after crashing the car into the pond.
15. They shot the film mostly chronologically, and that left producers a little concerned as they were seeing a lot of character drama. “They didn’t know what we were doing, and they were really anxious to get to the horror.” Those concerns were put to rest when they saw the dailies for the assault and bunkbed scene that follows.
16. It was Tapert who suggested they include the tree vine assault, and Alvarez was happy to see it used as more than just a shocker. “Being raped is her being injected with the devil,” says Levy, and he adds that it moves the story forward rather than just disturb.
17. The shower burn was the first bit of graphic mutilation that the writers conceived when they started working on the script.
18. The attempted escape in the Jeep after Mia is burned originally included a shot of David trying to call for help on his cell phone only to be stymied by a lack of service, but Alvarez took it out. He doesn’t think the audience needed it, and he didn’t want it to knock viewers out of the scene’s intensity.
19. The flooded river at 35:16 “is a real river.” It’s the same one the Jeep passes through at the beginning, and they simply waited for a heavy rain and then filmed the result.
20. Alvarez asked the sound department to come up with a unique sound for the Deadites, and the result was the crackling, “bug in a jar” noise.
21. “This was the hardest thing ever,” says Levy at 37:54 as her character projectile vomits blood onto Olivia’s (Lucas) face. They did four takes of the scene with Lucas having to be completely rinsed off and reset each time.
22. That’s not digital trickery at 39:32 as Olivia’s reflection gives an evil grin. “This was a timing thing because the mirror had to go away from me, and as it went away from me I had to actually do that face.” We see mostly the back and slight side of her outside of the reflection at this point, and the result is a cool little shot.
23. The bathroom encounter between Olivia and Eric originally ended with her hitting her head, but Raimi watched the dailies and asked Alvarez to milk the horror and gore a little bit longer.
24. “So everyone actually kills each other,” says Levy, “Mia never kills anybody in this movie.” Alvarez adds, “That’s the whole beauty of the story; Mia is the only innocent person, she’s a victim all the way.”
25. Alvarez recalls that one of Raimi’s “three rules of horror” is that “the innocent must be punished.” Does that contradict the point immediately above? Maybe, but she went through hell, and at the end of the day, are any of us actually innocent?
26. He acknowledges that the film, like many horror movies, is filled with characters making questionable choices, but he defends most of them as being understandable given the context.
27. “It’s my first sex scene,” says Levy at 1:31:11 as her character licks Natalie’s (Elizabeth Blackmore) leg. “This one was her stunt double’s leg.” She adds that “Kiss me, you dirty cunt!” is the favorite thing she’s ever said.
28. Natalie’s attempt to rinse her hand wound was originally written to include a black worm coming out of the gash, “but we didn’t want to be too supernatural.” Mr. Alvarez, my good man, have you seen your own movie?
29. Alvarez sees the theme of the movie as accepting that sometimes the only way out of a problem is through it – and here that means killing your friends before dismembering or burning their bodies. A good lesson for us all, really.
30. Eric’s laughter at Natalie saying “My face hurts” was real as Pucci found the line – one that Alvarez added on the fly – to be very funny given the situation and the fact that both of her arms are gone.
31. “Those woods were really, really creepy,” says Pucci, and Lucas adds that their New Zealand filming location was near a Maori burial ground.
32. Mia, gasping for her life in the hole with the plastic bag over her head, was apparently Levy’s audition scene.
33. They see Mia’s resurrection – the real Mia coming back to life after her brother’s janky defibrillator attempt – as a reward from beyond for David finally apologizing to her like he should have done from the start. I don’t mind saying that this is an odd take given how clear this film (and franchise as a whole) makes it that there’s absolutely no good supernatural entity looking out for these characters. Characters in these movies are absolutely and utterly fucked, and they should probably just accept that. Alvarez ultimately concedes that you can also just believe that the defibrillator actually worked.
34. For those who missed it, the necklace chain on the ground at 1:16:51 is in the shape of a skull as a nod to the scene in the original film where Ash (Campbell) goes for a necklace and sees a skull.
35. The machete comes through the wall at 1:20:10 and slices Mia’s leg, and they used Natalie’s prosthetic arm for the shot – it’s getting cut at the elbow.
36. They went through various versions of the Abomination Mia (Randal Wilson), including one that was made up of all five of the friends.
37. The original ending saw Mia walking on the road, but they cut it. The image still made it into the one-sheet poster.
38. The end credits feature extremely bloody shots filmed at high speed and meant to reference various beats from the film itself in tighter, close-up detail that viewers might have missed.
Quotes Without Context
“You kind of want to put the rape idea in people’s minds.”
“The car, of course.”
“I would definitely open the book.”
“Swimming through the swamp was fun.”
“Duct tape fixes everything.”
“How come David is such a bad boyfriend?”
“This kiss, I was really suffocating her.”
“I’m such a perv.”
“It’s like Beetlejuice.”
“Fede kept telling me this is my Bruce Willis moment to pump me up.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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