Director: William Grefé
Writers: Gary Crutcher from a story by William Grefé
From: Cult Cinema
A native American Vietnam veteran in the Everglades starts taking revenge on his enemies by having his pet rattler Stanley kill them.
Tim is a Vietnam vet and a naturalist with a penchant for snakes. In fact, he likes snakes more than people. He’s happy to spend the rest of his days isolated in the swamp with his snakes in his shack, but keeps getting harried by the poachers that murdered his father. They’re hunting snakes for a local scumbag looking to make snakeskin fashion. Tim initially thwarts them, but the pair come back with a drugged-up sociopath in tow.
Tim tricks the pair into falling into quicksand and lets them die. Back at the shack, the sociopath has arrived and killed all of Tim’s snakes, including the babies of Stanley and his mate. Tim fights the man, is about to be killed by him, but Stanley springs forth and bites the sociopath over and over.
That night, Tim goes into town to a burlesque house where a friend of his does a snake act with snakes provided by Tim. Business hasn’t been great so the owner suggests a new idea: the dancer bite the head off the snake. Tim witnesses the act, comes back that night, and dumps a bag of snakes into the dancer and owner’s bed.
Finally Tim goes to the house of the man who employed the poachers and throws snakes in his pool. The guy jumps in and is swarmed. However, his daughter witnesses it and Tim kidnaps her. He takes her back to his swamp saying his Eden needs an Eve. When she tries to leave that night, Tim tries to make his snakes kill her, but they turn on him and he ends up setting the shack on fire and dying from all the snakebites. The girl escapes. THE END
I feel at once like I left a lot of detail out of that description and went on too long. The movie takes a long time to establish the characters and get to any of the killing plus there’s a tonal issue throughout. When Tim kidnaps the girl, there’s a treacly love song playing, even over the part where he tells her, “I want to rape you.”
Yeah, what?
The closing credits play over an upbeat pro-environment song, the some one that opens the movie. How it in any way relates or is appropriate is beyond me.
Beyond the tonal problem is, as I mentioned, the timing and pacing. We take forever to establish where Tim stands in relation to these other characters and why he’d have cause to want to kill them. Then we don’t get any sort of cat-and-mouse, no moments of Tim planning or trying or failing. We literally have a scene with the character introduced, a scene with them sinning against snakes, then their death which is usually done without any panache or tension. Add to that incestuous and pedophilic overtones regarding the main villain’s daughter and you have a movie that’s actively trying to make me turn it off.
This kind of flick is supposed to be either a wronged figure getting gruesome but glorious revenge upon those who sinned against him or an obsessed figure who’s taken their cause too far. Tim should either be actively hunting the people who murdered his father and are despoiling his swamp or becoming a serial killer attacking various campers for their perceived trangressions against nature (see Memorial Valley Massacre for a movie that does that thematically. And is also a lot of fun). The movie, instead, is neither, never letting us relish Tim’s revenge and never going so far as to make us see him as a threat.
Until he kidnaps and talks about raping the daughter in the last twenty minutes of the movie. Frankly, that part felt kind of tacked-on, like they realized they’d run out of content from Tim’s revenge story so brought in this additional element.
Anyway, it’s boring and unambitious before you ever get to the objectionable stuff. Skip it.
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