SNAKES ON A TRAIN (No, I’m NOT kidding!)
Script Excreted with the Aid of an Entire Ex-Lax Chocolate Bar by Eric Forsberg
An Act of Celluloid Terrorism Inflicted on the World by The Mallachi Brothers
“The events, characters and firms depicted in this photo-play are fictitious. Really. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental, and very weird. We suggest moving and/or taking a plane.”
“No snakes were hurt in the making of this screenplay. Only a small child but it’s cool…”
“Why are you still reading this? Go back to the video store and rent another Asylim film. You know you want to.”
–END CREDITS DISCLAIMER–
Once upon a time…(ages ago…possibly last year)…someone had the ridiculous notion to come up with for a rip-off/sequel/utter piece of gobshite by the name of Snakes on a Train. My friend Corey and I chanced upon it at the video store…and as we were in the mood for a so-bad-it’s-brilliant movie, we took the plunge…
…and that plunge took us right into the abyss. This is a bad movie…this is a dreadful movie…this is a movie that can strip paint, cause cancer, blot out the sun, and heralds the arrival of the anti-Christ!
Where do I begin?
How about the longest, dullest, escape across the most pathetic Mexican border ever committed to film? Our intrepid escapees are a man we began to refer to as Jesus…mostly due to his messianic appearance of bulging eyes, messy hair, and his outfit…consisting of a burlap sack (complete with pockets), wrapped over a stylish black number that Roger Moore got rid off when he finished filming Live and Let Die in 1973! He is accompanied by his…what? Wife? Girlfriend? Enchanted black magic prostitute? Whatever she is, she maintains an 83-minute long set of shakes that is a cross between a bad orgasm and constipation…which is a direct result of the snakes she keeps spewing out of her mouth, congealed in green jell-o. By the way, these desperate, poorly-dressed souls are incapable of speaking English…until it’s revealed they speak PERFECT ENGLISH…in a scene where they first meet FELLOW MEXICANS!
Perhaps they were scarred by their initial meeting with the red-neck American at the beginning of the film…the whitest Texas honky to ever grace the small screen…complete with penchant for saying “F*CK” multiple times, under some misguided impression that he’s Texas’ answer to Shaft.
Hope you’re still paying attention…it just gets better. 
We finally get to the train they’re hoping to use to hitch a ride to Los Angeles. This train is unlike any train in our plane of existence. It’s as if Norman Bates’ Psycho hotel has been transplanted onto rails, complete with bad flourescent lighting, lime green pain schemes, ripped-and-peeling leatherette seats, beat-up fixtures…and, most evil of all…bathrooms that are unnaturally large for a train. We’re talking about enough room to stage Broadway numbers! I’ve seen apartments that have smaller bathrooms…but on this train, people get to defecate in roomy comfort!
Not that they do much defecating…unless you count their acting!
Our motley cast of characters continues to build. The conductor with a moustache that escaped the American civil war…the ambiguous lesbian girlfriends smuggling cocaine (complete with the unambiguously pornographic names “Crystal” and “Summer”)…the balding electrical engineer, flirting with the dullest single woman in the universe…the stoned surfer dudes who are refugees from a bad Keanu Reeves flick…a swarthy Arab man (conveniently referred to as a camel f*cker, in case we needed to know this is post-9/11 territory)…and a mysterious man in black, wearing a cowboy hat…accompanied by a musical sting EVERY TIME HE “SUDDENLY” APPEARS!
Oh, I forgot the cadre of Mexicans (who don’t look very Mexican), who keep calling each other Chico and Esse…and believe me…I’ve TRIED to forget them. Luckily, they decide to mess with our intrepid border jumpers…and lo and behold, snakes are crawling into arms that are victims of some disgustingly bad make up.
Except for Chico, of course (yes, one of these “chico’s” is actually NAMED Chico!). He’s busy taking off his shirt and having a swinging-from-the-doors fight with Burlap boy, in between train cars. The WWE has better choreographed fights than what we get here…though nothing in pro-wrestling compares to the sight of a bald, beer-bellied, pretend-latino, swinging between train cars like a monkey wearing a wifebeater t-shirt, and trying to beat up a Burlap-wearing Jesus wanna-be…
If I keep writing this review, I’ll go cross-eyed, so I’ll give you the edited highlights:
*Burlap Boy discovers that his snake-chucking wife’s childhood crush is on board, ready to lend a hand…how bloody convenient! There’s even a tender moment of reunion between constipated shakes, allowing time for the jell-o vomit to switch from green to black…
*Turns out cowboy-with-the-musical-sting is an ex-cop, who’s caught by another cop (the aforementioned Arab gentleman), who locks him up…and then tells him to take off his shirt, so that anyone who finds him will know he’s a fag….WHY??? Sure, he was about to put the moves on one of the ambiguously-lesbian girls, but COME ON! Obviously, there is supposed to be some past subtext involved….perhaps it was established in ANOTHER (better) MOVIE…
*…that must be the movie the ambiguously-lesbian-duo escaped from! Based on the slutty-by-Sears wardrobe and drooping breasts, it was obviously a porno…but I digress…
*And while we’re talking about the two cops…we should congratulate them…for engaging in the slowest, least-reactionary gun-fight in HISTORY! They plug each other…stand there, think about it, then return fire at pace that wouldn’t ruffle a slug. Judging by their facial expressions during this contest, it’s akin to watching two autistic Kryptonians fight to the death by throwing feces at each other…
*…actually, the end credits reveal that cop #2 is also the film’s second unit director! Obviously, multitasking is something he can’t do…
*We get a mom/dad/little girl combo….but the dad has a shiner, for no apparent reasons whatsoever! He also sleeps with a toothpick in his mouth…which obviously means he’s going to die. Horribly.
*On the other hand, the little girl dies when a giant snake EATS HER, legs first! Precocious film children deserve such deaths…proving that even this movie has it’s silver lining…
*The surfer dudes contribute nothing to the film…except to make you wonder if they were supposed to be snake food, before the $8.25 budget ran out…
*…which would also explain why, in the deleted scenes, it is revealed that everyone seems to have boarded the train IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE! They would seem to have great ticket agents in Death Valley…
*The use of stock footage in this film is…twisted. There are enough reused & repeated dying-peeling-skin-blood shots to put classic Star Trek & Battlestar Galactica to shame…and yet, none of the exterior shots of the train can decide whether this thing is made up of single-level cars or double-decker cars! But we’ll get back to this…
*…meanwhile, Burlap Boy crawls across the top of the chameleon train cars, making his way to the engineer…who promptly suffers a psychotic heart attack for NO APPARENT REASON AND RIPS APART THE WIRING IN HIS DEATH THROES! Only capitals can do this ridiculous scene justice…
*Further back in the bowels of the train, the civil-war-moustached conductor has an equally suddenly collapse before he becomes snake food…probably a result of his bullying at the hands of his fellow thespians in the blooper reel (can you say “TWAIN”?)…or maybe he finally caught a glimpse of his Wal-Mart-sized pay cheque for this role…
*While we’re on the subject of build-them-up-for-nothing roles…you introduce a character who is an electrical engineer, you have the engine wiring ripped out, you get the man to the engine room, he seems ready to fix the wiring…and THAT’S WHEN SNAKE-CHICK TURNS INTO AN ENORMOUS F-ING DEATH SNAKE (pausing for an intermediate, She-Blackula stage, complete with the most retarded fangs ever created!), EATS HER HUSBAND, AND PROCEEDS TO SWALLOW THE ENTIRE TRAIN WHOLE!
*Giant snakes, you say? The ultimate Hollywood pseudonym of shame – Alan Smithee – is credited as the Visual Effects Supervisor on this film. Some junior hack from ILM moonlighted to bring us a snake that makes the paper-mache marvel in the Doctor Who story Kinda look like million-dollar animatronics! Strangely enough, the snake actually looks more realistic that the train it swallows…
*But fear not! Childhood crush boy reappears with a magic talisman, given to him by Burlap Boy…and dispatches the Giant-former-woman-snake in a vast vortex of nuclear-inspired miasma!
You probably think I’m making all this up. Believe me…NO ONE could have made this up…except for the people who wrote & filmed this abominably hilarious and hideous THING, and unleashed it on the world – the love-child of Freud & Godzilla!
Snakes on a Train is a film that has been rescued from the deepest sh*thole of hell, disinfected with gallons of holy water, and marketed directly to DVD so that people like myself can nearly die of cramps induced by a combination of incredulity, shock, and laughing so hard that borderline organ failure occurs! I should have watched the film drunk…I can only imagine what it might have looked like through the rosy lenses of inebriation…but I doubt it would disguise the smell of wanna-be-porno/slasher-flick/urine-drenched muck on display here.
Boy…reading all of this, you’d never think I actually enjoyed this direct-to-video masterpiece. 
As for a rating? You’ve GOT to be joking…
