Writers: Boaz Davidson (story), Robby Robinson, Alexander Volz
In a rare occurrence that a movie is absolutely perfectly described by its own tagline, this one proudly announces: "It's big, it's bad and it bites!". No argument there! Mega Snake marks Nu Image's less than spectacular return to the realm of animal horror, not that their previous attempts like Shark Attack have been timeless masterpieces. However, this was apparently made for the SyFy channel, so it's ten times worse by definition.
People may say what they want, but it seems that the size does matter. Regular killing animals are just not enough these days, we have to have them enhanced somehow, so the market is flooded with all sorts of mega piranhas, giant octopuses, dinocrocs, supergators, sharktopuses, piranhacondas and who knows what else. How does Mega Snake fit in? It's utter crap, so I guess it fits perfectly.
The mega-stupid story, which Boaz Davidson probably wrote while totally wasted, goes something like this: There's this weird church that uses poisonous snakes for the "worshipping" rituals. Basically - if you have no fear, the snake won't bite you. The prologue finds our hero (then a very young boy) having his initiation or something. Unfortunately, he's afraid of snakes and screws everything up, so a snake bites his father and sends him into the oblivion.
Fast forward twenty years later and the troubled hero still lives in the same house as before, with his mother and older brother. That brother is still a proud "church" member and provides snakes for them. One day he decides that there simply weren't enough deaths in the family, so he goes off to an Indian snake seller to buy the deadliest possible snake in the history of the Universe. It's the infamous Unteka snake, responsible for killing a really big number of Native Americans (here's a history lesson for you). Because of its unprecedented deadliness, the Indian refuses to sell it to this stupid redneck, however, he conveniently mentions the tree rules for the handling of this particular snake: 1) Never let it out of the jar, 2) Never let it eat live animals, 3) Never fear the heart of the snake. You may guess three times how many of these rules get broken in the movie. The third rule seems a bit obscure, but we'll get there later.
Of course, the stupid bastard immediately breaks the jar (not on purpose) and the snake escapes, but he manages to catch it and puts it in a measly plastic box. That's the last time we see anything resembling a real snake in the movie. Bad CGI, take the spotlight!
The following night, the deadliest snake in the world easily escapes and kills a cat, then hides in the chicken pen and kills some chickens and then kills the hero's mother. The catch is - after each killing it gets bigger, until finally it transforms into... a MEGA SNAKE!
This Mega Snake is actually a really boring, lame looking monster that's so artificial it's almost sad. Miraculously, some of the scenes where the snake is eating someone look quite convincing (I don't know how the people at SyFy could allow such blatant breach of their policy), but that's the only nice thing I can say about anything in the movie. The snake acts strictly like a murderer in a slasher film - it hides and kills people one by one in totally unimaginative ways, until our hero is advised by the wise Indian that "never fear the heart of the snake" means that you should actually let the snake swallow you, so you can kill it from the inside. I'm not kidding. If you were hoping for some cool scenes of mass slaughter (like in Piranha 3D), blood, guts, severed body parts and other fun stuff... well, the joke's on you.
It's not that they don't attempt it - there's this classic Jaws moment with the authorities refusing to close the town fair because for some reason they just don't trust the warnings about a MEGA SNAKE roaming around. So the snake breaks the party and kills some people, but it's even more pathetic than the regular killings - the stunts in the background must have been misinformed about the nature of the scenes, so they just stand there and do nothing while five meters further the terrifying MEGA SNAKE "wreaks havoc". You see, for this movie they haven't used a real MEGA SNAKE, they added it digitally in the post production, so the people probably didn't know they were supposed to be scared. Professionalism at its finest! They should really put some warning on these SyFy movies in the future. One simple "This movie was made for the SyFy Channel" at the beginning should be enough for anyone to decide if they want to proceed any further.
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