Snake Eater

• Directed by George Erschbamer
• March 10, 1989

A Marine-turned-cop seeks to avenge the death of his parents and the kidnapping of his sister by a group of hillbillies.

Snake Eater is a low-budget action film that is built around ‘hicksploitation’ and general cheesy elements of the genre as it was in the ‘80s. In the latter it is often a distillation of the worst the time had to offer then. Lorenzo Lamas as Jack ‘Soldier’ Kelly who is your average rule breaking cop yet immediately comes off kinda creepy in a film that makes no pretense of being intelligent.

When viewing one gets the sense this is a teenage boy’s idea of an action movie. Soldier is the toughest of the tough and the coolest of the cool and he just comes off as creepy in the way a douchebag boy might be if his hormones were in overdrive. The opening scene is perhaps the strongest indicator of that where he alludes to hiding a wire in his a$$ and tries to sleep with a suspect. Yeah.

The jokes don’t land in that action-comedy type of way. Soldier uses ‘humorous’ double entendres that make you want to reach for the mace-the spray or the one with the spikes. Lamas is practically sleepwalking through this movie thus making the delivery of any line effectively very difficult. He had no ability to cover that.

The main threat of Snake Eater are a bunch of rednecks who live in the swamp. They’ve done a good job of covering up their crimes of kidnapping and murder and robbery bringing into question the effectiveness of local law enforcement. Junior Night (Robert Scott) and his family are like an unintentionally humorous take on Deliverance though based on the acting they are impossible to take seriously. The Night Family has decided to kill Soldier’s parents and kidnap his sister so naturally he must save them in some of the weakest action scenes ever staged.

Climax is mild bullets and muted explosions and you are left saying “Oh. That’s it?” The weirdest part though is that his whole motivation was saving his sister, but he’s more interested in hugging and kissing his love interest The Kid (Josie Bell) than in reuniting with his sister Jennifer (Chely Jeans) who was sexually assaulted and generally tormented by the villains. In the closing the actress looks like very much like a third wheel. She had no idea what to do and decides to pat Lamas on the back and just kind of moves around like “How can I get into this?”

There’s an opening and closing gag that made me, well, gag. Soldier begins as a police officer on a drug bust that doesn’t lead to drugs. He has two partners and nobody else on the bust with him and those two are waiting in a vehicle. One of them must pee and when a homeless man comes up as a gag the cop gives the homeless man his cup filled with urine. Enter the closing credits, Once again they are on a bust together. Somehow, though the two cops didn’t realize it but that’s not the point of what I’m saying. Once again, the homeless man comes up and they give him a cup of pee and he says you got me almost got me last time I brought my own sugar. Sounds offensive but when seen I dry heaved.

This tries so very hard to be a good movie. It apes what many other movies of the type were doing then. Somehow though it fails to be even a guilty pleasure. As much as I would like to completely blame Lamas, director George Erschbamer and writers Michael Paseornek and John Dunning were the minds behind this monstrosity. Of the no budgets of the time, this is the worst.

The movie itself is poorly derivative. It rips off better films such as Commando or dresses characters like they’re from better films such as Scarface. It desperately wants you to think it’s a higher caliber than it is, but also does nothing to try to be a higher caliber than it is. It has no desire to even be lazy. 

Snake Eater should’ve been guilty fun. It was not. It was the sloggiest of slogs and being a completist now I must watch the other two films and I hate myself for viewing this.