Sssssss (1973)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: Forgive me for what I am about to do…

Ssssssstrother Martin plays Dr. Stoner, a scientist who seems nice at first but most definitely is not.  As the movie begins he sells a mutant snake human thing to some redneck for a couple bucks. We all have to make a living.

Dirk Benedict plays a 42-year-old college ssssssstudent named David. Stoner recruits Benedict as his assistant for the sssssssummer and the first thing they do is get a boa drunk.

Stoner injects David with some kind of ssssssserum that he claims is an inoculation BUT IT’S NOT. That night David passes out and hallucinates some stock footage of volcanoes and oceans.

Ssssssstoner has a daughter, Kristina, who looks like a cross between Janis Joplin and discarded foreskin wearing the worst glasses available in 1973.

Stoner puts on a show in front of a crowd that’s way too big to watch him extract venom from a cobra. That night a black mamba bites Stoner so he should be dead but he says he has enough serum in his body for 10 mamba bites, which makes no sssssssense. How is he not a billionaire from selling that?

David has started shedding and Stoner tells him that it’s just the serum, which acts like a sssssssunburn from inside, which sounds f*cking horrible. How much is he getting paid for this?

Passage of time montage! Everyone has sssssssnake euphoria!

David goes ssssssskinny dipping with Kristina. Kristina is going to extract some venom…. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!

David and Christina go to a carnival and see a sssssssideshow owned by the guy who bought the mutant snake thing in the beginning. Inside David sees the Snake Man, who is Tim McGraw, Stoner’s old assistant and future country music superstar. Then David gets into a fight with a bully from college because David did absolutely nothing to his girlfriend in class and David starts biting him in the neck.

Oh, and the carnival apparently has a ssssssstripper tent? I was totally born in the wrong era.

The bully comes by Stoner’s house sssssssoused on a motorcycle with rape on his mind. He climbs up to Kristina’s room and the drunk boa, Harry, attacks him. He throws it on the ground, which kills it, because he’s The Hulk.

In the meantime, David is still unleashing his inner ssssssserpent. Kristina says to him, “Your face…” And David says, “Yes, on the A-Team.”

Stoner sssssssneaks into the bully’s pad and puts the black mamba in the shower with him. I don’t think his killing plan was meant to turn out so homoerotic.

David bangs Kristina in Stoner’s living room, even though they both have bedrooms there. Stoner is concerned because David is becoming a sssssssnake man and now Kristina is going to become pregnant with a mutant snake baby, or at least, that would have been a more interesting plot development.

What’s Stoner’s end game here with this research? To perfect a sssssssnake man? Why?

David’s totally looking like a snake but he’s still not adding it all up. He’s very ssssssstupid.

The professor from the college comes by to sssssssnoop and Stoner bashes his head after he sees David’s snake face. He wakes up chained to the wall and Stoner makes him choose a snake tank, each one with a key, and one snake is deadly poisonous. He picks the right tank, but then a giant python drops down and squeezes him good.

Kristina goes to the carnival to see the Snake Man and recognizes him and his music as Tim McGraw. You’ve never seen anything sssssssadder than a Snake Man shedding a tear.

The fuzz catch on to Stoner’s monkeyshines and come to bust up his unethical ssssssscience lab.

David finally turns into a sssssssnake with 6 minutes left in the movie. So Stoner’s plan was to make him completely into a cobra? OK, congratulations, but don’t cobras already exist? He says David has the power of a cobra but the intelligence of a man. And what good does that do?

Stoner has a heart to heart with the real cobra for some reason and it bites the piss out of him and kills him because it’s had enough. The cobra is the only thing in this movie that’s sssssssensible.

Snake David fights a mongoose. Kristina comes and finds her dad dead and one pissed off cobra. The cops arrive and shoot its face off, then they run inside and find Snake David wrestling with the mongoose. Somehow, Kristina knows that this total snake is actually David. It freeze-frames on her ssssssscream, and then the movie just sort of ends. Possibly the worst f*cking ending I’ve ever seen.

Is It Actually Scary: A little less scary than seeing a snake behind glass at the reptile house of the zoo where Dirk Benedict currently works mopping up gorilla diarrhea.

Scariest Moment: Thinking that every time you get a flu shot could be the first evil step into turning you into a snake person.

How Much Gore: When the bully throws Harry to the ground, shattering his very being, there’s some blood in its mouth. When they killed that snake for the scene not enough blood came out of its mouth, so they killed 16 more snakes and four bald eagles to get the right amount of blood.

Dumbest Moment: The entire thing is pretty dumb, and David is super dumb for letting all of this happen to him, but the dumbest moment has to be David’s snake transformation. I know it’s a schlocky monster movie, but it just defies the laws of physics and sense a little too much. How would a fully grown man shrink to the size of a cobra? Where does the rest of his mass go? What happens to his wiener? Check out David going from dumb lab rat to king of the snakes here:

Any Nudity: Well, there’s that jock in the shower, and you can see his nude silhouette through the shower curtain, if that’s your thing, and I suppose David is totally naked when he turns into a snake at the end.

Overall: I really thought this movie was going to be about Dirk Benedict turning into a snake man and then terrorizing the town. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. What was Strother Martin thinking? The director was mostly a TV guy and it definitely shows, the film stock has that TV movie feel and there’s no atmosphere whatsoever. I was positive the ending would be David will die and they’ll make a point to show Kristina’s pregnant belly, maybe a overlay of the snake child growing inside. But, you know, a freeze-frame is just as good.

Score: 3 S’s (out of 10)

Bonus True or False Trivia: Dirk Benedict invented Eggs Benedict during the filming of this movie using snake eggs and Canadian bacon cut from the flank of actor Richard Shull (the professor squeezed by the python).