"Snakes! Snakes? Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaakessss!" Snakes on a Plane Review and MORE

Alright, I'm back from the all-too-brief respite of the weekend and ready to lay it down for ya.

I'll start by tackling the subject on the lips of everyone in showbiz right now - Snakes on a Plane -- why did it bomb?

I think there has got to be a realization that a movie primarily fueled by internet buzz is good for about 8 to 16 million at the box office - at this point, no more. See exhibit A: Clerks II. See exhibit B: Snakes on a Plane.

The thing with these movies is that they appeal to a relatively small audience, albeit one that happens to be very vocal. Also, sadly in some cases, I think the blame lies partly on us - Generation Y. Sadly, I don't know if we are where the money is, at least not yet. We are the generation most dripping with ironic appreciation of bad movies - I don't know if anyone over the age of 35 not named Quentin Tarantino quite gets why the whole Snakes on a Plane thing was ever that funny in the first place - and yet as of now we are a generation that is low on time, strapped for cash, and more apt to go on the internet and JOKE about Snakes on a Plane than actually pay 10 bucks to see it in a theater.

Can Gen Y be a moneymaker for a major movie studio? Honestly, I don't know. Remember, we are the generation that went to college with broadband internet right in the prime of the Napster boom. I remember many a college night huddled around someone's desktop watching a bootlegged copy of Boondock Saints or whatever that someone ripped off of the intra-college network. Most of us are in crappy entry level jobs with no real opportunity yet to put our unprecedentedly expensive college educations to use. We were the ones who grew up with an ironic appreciation for the awesomely bad movies of Jean Claude Van Damme, Hulk Hogan, and the like, and then watched as guys like Quentin Tarantino took the B-movie genre and turned it into blissfully self-aware pop art. We were the ones who went to see Snakes on a Plane on Friday and Saturday night ... and sadly, we're not good for that much in the way of bank, at least not yet.

And it doesn't look good for the future of Snakes, either. Most people realize that the only way to see this movie is to see it in a crowded theater, for optimum reaction and participation from the peanut gallery. If only a handful of Snake devotees turned out on opening weekend - (as I alluded to above, my Friday night showing was mostly filled with irony-saavy Gen Y-ers and a few younger teenagers), then what hope do the stragglers have to get the optimal Snakes experience in a theater this coming weekend or the weekend after?

With all that being said, this isn't exactly Titanic in the budget department, so I'm sure when all is said and done (and the inevitable DVD's are sold by the bucketload), SOAP will emerge as profitable for the studio. But here's a little hint for the future: A low budget cult classic is given its status by the FANS, not by studio-created, prerelease hype.

And on that note, on to the much anticipated ...

SNAKES ON A PLANE Review:

And they said irony was dead.

Well, "they" were clearly wrong, as for months now, the internet has been buzzing about how great Snakes on a Plane was going to be, based largely on how entertainingly bad it appeared to be.

But some movies are so "bad" that they are great - campy classics, often ones we took in as kids, that somehow struck a certain chord that made them more than just a bad movie, but a sentimental favorite. This week, for example, The Wizard came out on DVD. By no means a "great" movie, but for many of us, when were seven or eight, it was the Best Thing Ever. Hence, the nostalgia tinged lense we watch it through makes it great in its own weird, Power Glove-sporting way.

And then, there are the "great" B movies. Movies like Army of Darkness and Evil Dead, like some of the blaxploitation and martial arts movies from the 70's. Movies that had low budgets and a large degree of campiness, but in their own way had a huge spark of imagination and a unique sense of style and self-aware humor - an undeniable coolness factor. Even though an uninformed observer might see these movies and dub them bad, those in the know recognized their innate awesomeness.

It is in this tradition that Snakes on a Plane tries to land - a movie that takes all the trappings of the worst late-night TV movies and says "look, we are not pretending to be a polished, big-budget epic when we're not - we're taking the inhernet cheesiness of the concept and running with it - we're f'n Snakes on a Plane."

But here's the thing - a bad movie is a bad movie. And make no mistake - in it's original incarnation, Snakes was clearly one craptacular flick, about on the level of Mansquito. Just because audiences of a certain generation have been cultivated to enjoy a bad movie almost as much as a good movie - by laughing AT it and enjoying it ironically, this doesn't make it good.

I mean, look, I thought the Island was a complete trainwreck, but I had a great time at the theater mocking it's crappiness with my friends. Does that somehow make it a good movie? Hells no.

So now, here's the kicker - the Snakes producers got wind that their endearingly titled C-grade horror movie was becoming an internet sensation, largely due to the sheer audacity of calling it Snakes on a Plane (again, bringing to mind those terrible late-night Sci Fi movies). So due to a fluke of the pre-production title being leaked to the public, the producers were left with a dilmena: a growing internet fanbase was sitting around getting hyped up about a movie that they assumed would be a self-aware horror-comedy - a balls to the wall, crazy-ass flick that pitted Samuel Jackson in full-on badass mode against a plane full of killer Snakes.

But what was the reality here? This was by no means a lovingly-crafted piece of genre-reinventing pop art that the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, or Sam Raimi might have created.

Nope, it was just a really crappy movie, with bad CGI, a phoning-it-in Sam Jackson, and of all things a PG-13 rating. Not good, not good at all.

So, then what happened? The suits got wise to the fact that the fanbase had a much different expectation for this film than what the reality of it actually was. In response, a bunch of reshoots are done, more sex and violence is added, and the whole movie is painted over with a winking gloss that says "yeah, see, we ARE in on the joke, we WANT you to laugh."

So yeah, the whole state of this movie is pretty much summed up by the fact that its best, trademark line was thought up by random internet bloggers rather than the actual writers of the movie. In the ultimate example of internet populism meets corporate America, the few, the outspoken, the irony-lovin', Snakes-cheering, Sam Jackson-worshipping fanboys got the movie that THEY envisioned.

Well, sort of.

That's the crazy thing about this movie -- it is like a crazy mishmash of moments that are genuinely, unintentionally bad with other moments that are genuinely, intentionally bad. And the weird thing is I'm not sure which parts were funnier.

Because in the end, the movie mostly lived up to my expectations - it was a blast to see in a packed theater, full of rowdy fans eager to see Samuel L Jackson lay the smackdown on some snakes.

But had this movie been made, from the START, with a smart, hip, self-aware mindset - had it had someone at the helm like a Sam Raimi who really gets horror-comedy and really could infuse a movie like this with legitimate creativity and vision - well, then it could have really been something - a true B-movie cult classic.

As it stands now, it is a bad movie trying a little too hard to be an enjoyably bad movie. Oh, sure, it was pretty enjoyable, but take away the rowdy crowd and the fun of all the prerelease buzz, and what are you left with? A poorly-shot, badly-written thriller with mostly mediocre performances and a few great one-liners.

And let's set one thing straight - yes, this is a movie that invites audience participation, and in my view you can't beat a great live audience to heighten the fun of, well, just about anything. But come on - if Deep Blue Sea had been called "Super Intelligent Sharks Attack!" and benefitted from the same amount of internet buzz, that movie would have had as good of an audience reaction and been even better, since it actually had some cool action sequences, a fun cast, and some plot creativity - and hey, it even had a badass Samuel L Jackson.

So yeah, I hope that all of you who can't help but smile at the very IDEA of a movie called Snakes on a Plane headed to the biggest multiplex around this weekend with a few friends, kicked back, and cheered everytime Sam Jackson did something badass. I hope you laughed at the sheer awfulness of Keenan Thompson, smiled ironic smiles of mockery at the carboard characters, and had a small spasm of glee as the screen morphed into green-tinged "snake-vision." And I hope you applauded and cheered as Jackson dutifully uttered the movie's now-famous catchphrase, and that that glorious, expletive-filled sentance was all you hoped it would be and more. I know I got a kick out of it, and yeah, I had a great time as the theater watching Snakes on a by-god Plane. Probably most of all, it was because this film invited the audience to be a part of it - to cheer, to boo, to clap, to yell out random obnoxious comments. Unlike most crappy movies, where you have to sit there in silence and take it, this one wore its crappiness like a badge of honor -- a heavily-market-researched, corporately-manufactured badge of honor, but a badge of honor nonetheless. And I respect that. I think. Kind of.

But let's not kid ourselves - this was a bad movie that mostly kicked ass because we were so, so ready for it to. As cool as it is to see a movie transform itself mid-production to better represent what the fans wanted, it still makes you wonder -- has it really come to this? Do the fans now have to take it upon themselves to add all the best parts to a movie? Snakes on a Plane, if nothing else, establishes an amazing (though not necessarily succesful, with this weekend's box office-returns) new precedent for Hollywood marketing - just don't get tricked into thinking that this is anything more than what it really is - a movie that's occasionally fun to laugh with, but mostly just fun to laugh at.

Still, you gotta love a python squeezing a guy till he drops, venomous serpents dropping in on a couple aiming to join the mile high club, and a rap star who learns an important lesson about how to keep it real, even in the midst of being trapped in a plane whilst being attacked by an army of rabid snakes. Dammit all, I think my grade just went up one notch.

My Grade: B -

- Alright, what else?

- How about tonight's RETURN of last season's best new TV show: PRISONBREAK.

Like Snakes on a Plane, in a way, Prisonbreak is completely over the top and implausible, but fun as all hell. Great characters, 24-like intensity, and an overall sense of overriding badassness makes tonight's Season 2 premiere a must-watch.

I have to say though, I'm almost kinda sad that the Fall TV Season is beginning ... as much as I am a TV junkie, and work in TV, I hate the amount of time that TV can take up during my week. As comforting as it is to have, say, a new episode of Prisonbreak to look forward to on a Monday night after a long day's work, it is also nice to come home and have the night be an open book, so to speak.

And that's about all I have for now -- stay tuned tommorow for a major blog-related announcement ...

And how about it: Can I get some mother$#%# comments on this mother%$&% blog?