The Direct to Video Connoisseur

I'm a huge fan of action, horror, sci-fi, and comedy, especially of the Direct to Video variety. In this blog I review some of my favorites and not so favorites, and encourage people to comment and add to the discussion. For announcements and updates, don't forget to Follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook page. If you're the director, producer, distributor, etc. of a low-budget feature length film and you'd like to send me a copy to review, you can contact me at dtvconnoisseur[at]yahoo.com. I'd love to check out what you got. And check out my book, Chad in Accounting, over on Amazon.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Snake Eater (1989)

I found this film for free ON Demand a little while ago, and gave it a look solely for the Lamas factor. A buddy of mine saw it the same way. There was a scene at the beginning that was particularly cool, and we tried to explain it to our friends. I'm not sure we did it justice.

Snake Eater is about a Marine special ops dude, DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas, who is working as a vice cop with former Miami Dolphin Larry Csonka in a city, when he gets word that his parents were murdered and his sister taken into the jungle by these inbred baddies. He doesn't even know if she's still alive, but he must find out and exact revenge, which he does with the help of a woman who works at the marina. Also, the woman at the marina and her dad take his bike and make a boat out of it.


There are some great scenes in this. Lamas gets into a bar fight, and he throws a beer bottle, which shatters when it hits some guy's crotch. I understand that bottles in movies tend to break more easily than they do in real life for the effect, but breaking over a crotch is a tad too much.

The best scene is at the beginning, when Lamas is working undercover. The woman he's buying from thinks he's a cop, and they both get naked to show that neither is wearing a wire. Then the woman's drug dealer and some thugs come in to rob him, and Lamas unleashes this booby trap of nails that goes off and shoots right through the guys' feet. It was so amazing. When Larry Csonka, his police superior, asks where he kept the wire, he lets him wonder, then shows us, the audience, that he kept it in his hair.


There was quite a bit that I didn't like about this film, though. It was a little too dark to be fun. The inbreds were very psychotic, and when they kill off the parents, it's pretty vicious (the mom's head got put in a pot of boiling water). The place the inbreds lived in the jungle was pretty gross too. I know it's gotta be kind of gross, but too gross, and we're in the Bruce Penhall Spike TV category of bad action, which is bad place to be.

Lamas' karate and action work was solid. It wasn't exactly Renegade quality, and there weren't any scenes like the one with the fat guy in Black Dawn, but it was good. Sometimes it was a little bit much, like when the bottle broke on the guy's crotch, or how Lamas got out of this situation where he and his lady friend were tied up and hung from a tree in sleeping bags, but I can suspend reality some if I'm watching bad action.


That being said, I can't recommend this, because it's too dark to really be worth spending money on. Seeing it for free On Demand is one thing, but buying it is another. I love Lamas, and I love bad action, but I'm just not a big fan of old women getting their faces put in pots of boiling water. I don't know what it is, but that just doesn't do it for me.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100645/

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/


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