Boo! Did I scare you? No? Oh. Well, could you get me some little yellow pills? My eye hurts and... OH MY GOD! AAAAHHHHHHHHH! HELP ME! HELP ME! OH SHIT! AAAAHHHHHHHH!... sorry, this is usually a lot funnier when you can see me holding the fake detached eyeball and squirting ketchup packets from behind my hands. Yeah... usually a lot funnier like that... Anyway, Happy Halloween ghouls and fools! I'm celebrating this year with a heavy dose of Bruce Campbell's new flick My Name Is Bruce today and tomorrow (and maybe Sunday), but before that there's a little matter of a serpent infestation to discuss.

First, props to Mister DarkSider of DarkSider's Realm. The man put together a holiday roundtable for the usual suspects centered around something most people are creeped out by: the things that crawl and slither and bite. Originally I was going to do a good old fashioned centipede attack movie, but with the Evil Dead Bride's terror of things with more than 8 legs, I thought it better not to risk my spot in bed by reviewing a flick that would make it impossible for her to close her eyes for a week following. So instead I went with Calamity of Snakes... yes, for all the Groany McGripertons out there, it is another obscure Asian horror exploitation movie. And for the last time, I'm not some kind of snob who snubs his own country's crap cinema in favor of watching shit no one else has ever seen before just so I can look down my nose at others and say, “Ohhhhhh, you've never seeeeeeeen Calamity of Snakes? I'm not surprised, since you are an ignorant working class slob with limited brain capacity after all”. I'm just trying to expose our readers to shit they normally won't find on a lot of bad movie sites. For fuck's sake, before you know it John McCain will have a smear commercial up about how I'm an “elitist”. Yeah, look at me with my big fancy New York State high school education and failed 3 semester run in a community college. I FAILED COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOR GODZILLA'S SAKE! My collar is blue good sirs and madams. Blue like Papa Smurf's balls... you know, because he's got blue skin AND he probably doesn't do too much jerkin' of his gherkin. Funny, right? Yeah, maybe in 5th grade.

Because the names of the characters seem to change randomly depending on the person referring to them (not really, I'm just too lazy to try and pay attention), I'm giving everybody uniform monikers (not to be confused with monogrammed uniforms) in an effort to keep shit straight. Bob is an architect working on the development of a 17 story (though later the elevator only notes there being 14 floors...) luxury apartment building... I'm not sure if he takes Enzyte though. Larry is the big boss in charge of the structure and who has given Bob no more than 8 weeks to oversee its completion. Swifty is Larry's toady and as such oozes sliminess and a desperation to make sure Larry is happy at all times. Carol is Larry's wife, who opens the movie with an opening credits sequence made of a red & blue menagerie of vid clips of herself being attacked by pissed off snakes. Denise is the daughter of Larry and Carol, and soon-to-be love interest to Bob... who makes me wish I would've chosen a different name for him, since every time I type his name I think of that creepy grinning weirdie with the 17 hour hard-on because he's constantly popping boner meds at work. Do they really need to run the “office rapist Santa” commercial all year round?!

While Larry and Swifty are visiting Bob at the construction site (in other words hassling him for not wanting to cut corners in order to get the building finished under an unfair schedule), somebody unearths a big nest of vipers! Not wanting to wait for the Fire Marshall to come and clear out the serpent infestation, Larry orders the belly crawlers slaughtered instead. Bob says it's cruel and the workers want to let the reptiles slither off peacefully, but Larry's pretty firm on the wholesale murder of the phallic trespassers. Carol and Denise show up shouting about curses and bad ju-ju, but when your wife's having snake hallucinations you know it's some subconscious thing about your inadequate genitals and not a premonition that you shouldn't squash Mother Nature under your steam shovel... which incidentally haven't been powered by steam for decades and thus the name should probably be changed. As I was saying, a posse of movie extras in overalls and coolie hats set about chopping up a group of real snakes with their pick-axes and shovels because realism is preferable over the wishes of the ASPCA. Ah the Chinese, second only to the Italians when it comes to animal cruelty for the sake of trash cinema!

There's five minutes of guys cutting snakes in half before it's finally done. Carnage the likes of which I haven't seen since our childhood boxer-pitbull mutt Jo get a hold of one and mauled it like a Nerf football... only a Nerf football full of blood and entrails. While Carol's praying for Buddha to forgive her husband's rash and violent desecration of the serpents, Denise drags Bob out for a walk date where she plays the whiny brat and he voices his dislike for her mom's over-reliance on religion and her dad's Machiavellian approach to business. But, as an everyday Bob the Builder type (or Joe the Plumber, or Terrence the Pimp, or Sheena the Drag Queen...), he also makes her realize that she's an uppity snob who needs to come down off her throne and get in touch with the rest of the people... who apparently like to drink fresh blood from snake bladders as an aphrodisiac and all around wonder drug. I hear it cures impetigo too, but I'm waiting till after Halloween for that. I'm going as a zombie this year and I'll save all kinds of money on makeup!

The building of the condos goes off without a hitch... at least until the opening. As expected, the dead snakes' big brothers come looking for revenge on the workers in one of those “amok” situations that nature likes to run so much. Efforts to repel the glorified land eels are of no avail (also as expected), and even when they think every last one has been bounced from the premises, more seem to squirm up out of nowhere. When the remaining workers are killed off in one big late night swarm attack, snake handlers are brought in to clean out the slitherers a second time, but this time they bring along a pack of mongooses (mongeese?) to chew the beasties' heads off. So it's another five minute sequence of animal cruelty, but at least it's Discovery Channel approved animal cruelty. To further complicate things, the handler suspects that the snakes are attacking under the leadership of... a giant boa! I hope it's Ed Wood's big pink feathered boa. That'd be funny.

When a mere handler won't do, a snake master (we'll call him Bruce) is summoned to the scene to deal with the monster. Tracking it to its hidey-hole (not to be mistaken for Heidi's hole...), Bruce unleashes his snake-fu upon their scaly backsides, kicking, tearing, and even biting more of the smaller ones in half! Big Momma (Mamba?) shows up and boy does Bruce have egg on his face (no, wait, that's snake blood) when she smells her homies on his breath. Roaring like a Bengal tiger (no fake), the monster leaps at him and the two get into a fist-to-fang exchange the likes of which hasn't been seen since Abe Lincoln suplexed that Kodiak bear at his inauguration! Using its body like a 30ft meat whip and chomping off a few of the master's fingers, the roaring (and I can't emphasize that enough) Ophidia almost gets the best of Bruce in one of what has to be the greatest fight scenes ever to feature an old man rumbling with a giant rubber snake. The one with opposable thumbs wins out in the end though, lynching the creature and gradually strangling it until it finally gives up the ghost. Of course, nobody notices the other sizable set of scales crawling around in the shadows just out of sight... unless of course it suddenly decides to tip them off by ROARING.

With the snakes seemingly maintained (the second half of the movie would be pretty uneventful if they really were), Larry has little problem filling the new apartments in his building with an assortment of obnoxiously wacky characters. All this means is the Chinese buffet for the slithering-behemoths to come is guaranteed to be well stocked for the lunch time rush. In fact, Larry throws a party for everyone to announce the start of his next big project, which he's hired Bob to come back and helm as well. Speaking of Bob, he and Denise are good friends now, but apparently once he gets his own company started they plan on getting together in the “rings on the fingers” sense. Looks like she doesn't discriminate against the lack of inches on a penis so much as the lack of zeros in a bank account. Either way it's not long before the next swarm of spring-loaded scalies come gyrating in to cause trouble, literally exploding through loose floorboards in the basement. After the other big 'un takes out a security guard, the little ones get to work on the rest of the building, starting with attacking an old man in the parking garage when they SMASH IN HIS WINDSHIELD. He must've bought one of those Honda models with the candy glass windows before the recall was issued.

Residents are attacked left and right as the serpents make their way through the floors of the building (some of which can crawl up the side of the building I guess...), killing the fodder off one-by-one as extras are smothered in blankets of reptiles. Larry is a self-made business man like George Jefferson though, so he doesn't lie down for any honky snake! In fact, when the venom spewers attack his wife, he grabs the nearest katana blade and cuts down swathes of the boots-to-be!... that are thrown at him slow-mo style by animal handlers from off-screen. If the world is ever taken over by militant Butterball turkeys, I want this dude on my side doing the carving! Meanwhile, the party-goers are bitten en masse as all scaly Hell breaks loose and Larry shows his true color to be yellow (not a racist joke, so don't even start) as he leaves Carol alone amidst the biters so he can make a run for his own ass. On the cavalry side of things, the cops show up with fire proof suits looking like extras from The Andromeda Strain and wielding flamethrowers to do battle with the other giant boa in the flick's finale! The monster throws everything it has at them (including a drum set and a large piece of eagle statuary!), but ends up the world's largest burnt length of ROARING sausage alongside several of its living companions who are also set on fire just to top the previous parts where they'd been beaten, cut in half, and chewed on. Big Daddy doesn't go down alone though, because once its scales catch fire, it throws itself through the air SCUD missile-like to encoil Larry! The lecherous lout spends the final moments of his life wrestling a giant burning python and toasting like a summer camp marshmallow doused in lighter fluid. The end.

Or is it more like “The End?”?... no no, it's the end, honest.

Calamity of Snakes is surprisingly light in the kung-fu loafers compared to other Hong Kong horror flicks. Granted, there's still a scene where an artificially aged man and a giant boa constrictor GET INTO A MIXED MARTIAL ARTS INTER-SPECIES STREET FIGHT, but beyond that the production was all about trying to spook viewers with piles of snakes writhing around on the always underpaid extras, and trying to make animal lovers sick with grief over watching real snakes being mercilessly mutilated. You've gotta give it to the cast for willing to be draped in hordes of creepy crawlers, but even if you don't like the slithering little creatures it's still hard to watch so many of them getting legitimately (and violently) killed. Reminds me a little of the slaughterhouse stuff from Faces of Death... CoS is your basic pissed-off-animals story, your basic “morally clean good guy vs. corrupt corporate bad guy” subplot, and your basic “working class guy shows an upper class snob gal how to love” romance otherwise, coupled with a basic cheesy '80s synthesizer “horror action” soundtrack to carry it along too. If John Carpenter has an illegitimate brother in Hong Kong that's a big fan of the keytar, I'm pretty sure he worked on this movie.

If snakes still make the hairs on your neck do the Thriller dance and watching people roll around in piles of them make it harder for you to breathe than a Holyfield haymaker to the larynx, you'll probably be pretty freaked out... when you're not laughing. Fortunately it's not boring, but it's just slow enough that when the crazy giant snake fight scenes happen, you'll appreciate them all the more. As if the concept of a man brawling with a 30ft boa that roars like sound bytes of Battle Cat from the He-Man cartoons doesn't blow your brains out of the back of your skull already, consider this: I'm pretty sure the giant snake is an actual dead/drugged python yanked around marionette style via wire-fu. I could be wrong, but for a movie that refuses to use rubber snakes in lieu of brutalizing real ones, I'm not so sure the big guys are any less real... just less alive.

Alright, I gotta go empty out my spam folder before I go hassle the neighbors for free candy. I don't know why but I've been getting an abundance of farm porn solicits recently. I used to get a lot of black-on-white and ass-to-mouth spam, but now the subjects all read along the lines of “dirty farm whore gangbanged by horny hogs” or stuff about women being fuck on or with tractors. Makes me miss the days of “See stupid skank's eyes glued shut with midget cum!”... Remember kids, don't go trick or treating at any of those houses with sex offender signs... unless they're giving out full sized Kit Kat bars... oh the sins I've committed for Kit Kat bars.