The advice that follows will seem obvious once I mention it, but if you’re planning to see “Snakes on a Plane,” you’ll thank me anyway.
It’s not a movie where you’ll feel comfortable wearing flip- flops. Or sandals. Or Crocs. Or, frankly, any form of open-toed shoe.
Good, now that we’ve got that cleared up, we can move on to some other important safety tips.
Safety Tip No. 1: When traveling with deadly snakes, don’t be a Chihuahua. As the saying goes, for every lap dog, there’s a python.
No. 2: Don’t be British, or French, or a foreigner of any kind. You can just imagine what happens to the Limey who tosses the Chihuahua toward the snakes in order to save his own bangers and mash.
No. 3: Close that hatch. And don’t open that door. Nope, not that one, either. Definitely not that other one. And don’t even think about opening the one up there.
No. 4: Did you know snakes can bite through avionics? I don’t even know what avionics are. But it sounds painful.
We could go on. “Snakes on a Plane” will make you rethink the whole idea of ever flying again. Heck, it’ll make you rethink the whole idea of ever sleeping again. Yes, it’s a one-concept movie where, once you get the plot summary – wholly encompassed by the title – the rest is filler.
But the filler works fairly well, and when Samuel L. Jackson finally unleashes the beloved (and obscenity-laden) catchphrase from the film’s unusually popular trailer, the theater erupts in cheers.
I’m still not sure you can mint a cult classic before anyone has actually seen the movie. Promoters of this phrase-making horror film whipped up an Internet fury of interest long before anyone knew whether director David Ellis was making a B movie on purpose. Will “Snakes on a Plane” someday play college irony festivals alongside “Roadhouse” and “Empire of the Ants?” Minds more intelligent than mine, and less frazzled by watching an adder attack a passenger in the eyeball, will long ponder this.
In the meantime, we have Samuel L. Jackson battling anacondas with a spork, what with all these restrictions about sharp objects in carry-on luggage.
“Snakes on a Plane” will immediately challenge Ricky Bobby and “Talladega Nights” for most-quoted lines of the summer film season: “That’s good news: Snakes on crack.” Or, “You’re not going to believe what came out of the instrument panel.” Or, “Everybody move forward – cautiously!”
Whether “Snakes on a Plane” means to be bad, or is just bad by being its own bad self, the truth is it’s so bad that it’s pretty good.
You simply cannot fault a movie that allows its villain – the one who shipped poisonous snakes in a cargo hold in order to kill the only witness to a murder, and then had the rest of the cargo sprayed with pheromones to make the snakes go ape – to say something as meta-ironic as this:
“You think I didn’t exhaust every other option?”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.