Throwback Disaster Musings post: VIPERS!

Tara Reid might just be my new favorite actress, if only because she seems totally willing to keep a straight face and give it her all in a movie like Vipers.

Although, I'm not sure 'actress' is the right word. Perhaps we need a new name for this type of endeavor. Actually, I think that all SciFi (or is it now ScyFy? Or ScyFi?) stock cast members should fall into a special category. They're not quite ready to throw in the towel and head over to a soap opera, but they appreciate the paycheck and screen time of a made-for-tv SciFi movie enough that they will participate in such cinematic gems as : Vipers, Supergator, and the upcoming Sharktopus.

Anyway, back to Tara Reid and co in Vipers..where a small town on a

rural west coast island (I’m assuming off the coast of Oregon or perhaps Washington State) is overrun with genetically enhanced vipers.

If you ignore the plot holes the size of Texas—which shouldn’t be hard given the fact that you’ve already committed to spending 2 hours of your life watching a movie called Vipers—this was actually one of the better creature features I’ve seen in recent years.

This does not mean that Vipers is actually good, just better than some of the others I’ve seen recently.

I think this has something to do with the fact that CGI snakes do not look nearly as fake as some others, especially when they are small. There have been plenty of snake movies made in the past few years and I think they’ve kind of gotten the hang of making the gross little hissing things look OK.

The movie was also really smart about the actual attacks. Although there was plenty of fake blood spraying around, we didn’t have to suffer through any weird slow-motion close ups of teeth chomping on still writhing and screaming victims (more on this later..thanks to my 2 hours of time spent with Supergator).

Tara Reid manages to be both slightly nauseating in her emotional scenes and nominally credible in her action 'lets kill the snake scenes'. I think she missed her calling with all of those American Pie movies! She's actually pretty fierce when she's trying to protect all of her people from creepy crawlers.

Overall, I appreciated that:

1. Not every female character was a complete ninny

2. Had a few B/C list actors slumming it up in a made for tv snake movie

3. The rules were followed: sex=death, adultery=death, and being a child=safe!

and

4. Despite this being a creature feature at least 1 character died in a totally bizarre and non-snake related manner.

While this is clearly a B-horror movie due to campiness, slumming actors and its made-for-tv status..I'm actually a fan! Go Vipers!

ps. Also loving the fact that random Buffy characters are starting to pop up in these movies..woohoo!

Snakes are just like serial killers!

Ben and I were watching TV the other night and had the choice between What not to Wear and Anacondas.. and we (obviously) chose the bad snake movie! After 2 hours of really bad CGI snakeness, I had an epiphany: giant snakes are just like serial killers!

Snake and Serial Killer Similarities:

1) Both big (yucky) snakes and scary people with knives single out those movie characters stupid enough to go anywhere alone. Do not enter the dark garage, the jungle, or the whatever and expect to escape unscathed.

2) There is always a teaser scene.. always. When two people do something seemingly stupid (see above), the music starts getting scary and you think the whatever (snake/killer) is about to attack. Wrong! The two people did not break the alone rule and are thus safe.. for now.

3) Being in a relationship and or having sex usually dooms you to death. If you are the female lead it's likely that you will be terrorized post-sex, but probably end up surviving. Think Neve Campbell in Scream and JLo in Anacondas. Sucks to be the friends in relationships.. they all die.

4) The lead character is a woman. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure there are a few exceptions..but generally speaking!), but somehow it's always a woman who is the intended victim. Serial killers tend to be more selective, but snakes also have an uncanny knack for eating all of the bit characters and leaving at least one terrorized girl behind.


5) Both giant snakes and crazy killers are really hard to kill. You can shoot them, light them on fire, stab them or all of the above and they're more than likely to survive and either kill one of your remaining friends or at least scare you when they suddenly rear up and look scary. Then you can kill them for real.