Slithery Sssssssinema

I tend to have a soft spot for many things from the 70's. The music, the television, and of course, the movies. For every world famous movie like Star Wars or Saturday Night Fever, there are a ton more "cut-out bin" level movies that went on to be forgotten. (cut out bin-a display in a store filled with "clearance" items, most commonly used in reference to music records that have a corner of the cover cut off or punched by a hole punch to mark them as clearance items.) Luckily for me, and others who love these old B and C rated movies, most have been released on low cost DVDs in recent years making it possible for a new generation of film fans to "suffer" through them. Many have achieved some level of cult status, others just exist to fill a nostalgic void.

One such "lost" film from my early childhood was an eerie horror film called Sssssss.



Originally released in 1973, I actually had the pleasure of catching this movie for the first time on the Armed Forces Network in the mid 70's in Zweibrucken, Germany in 1976. With only one English language channel you were kind of stuck with whatever was on TV which was usually made up of second rate movies and episodes of TV programs well past their original debuts in the U.S. For the remainder of my childhood and teen years Sssssss would remain a must watch every time it came on late late movie television programming. Sadly sometime in the late 80's TV thought itself too sophisticated for overly crappy movies and the showing of rare movies that failed miserably at the box office (or even failed to make it to the theater going straight to TV before even "straight to video" was thought of) slowly faded away leaving those box office bombs lost in film limbo. But let me offer a quick description of Sssssss.



Dr. Carl Stoner (cool name, played by Stother Martin ala Slapshot, Up in Smoke)is a seemingly nice old guy who experiments on animals for the betterment of science in particular snakes and to move things along Dr. Stoner hires an assistant, college student David Blake played by up and coming actor Dirk Benedict (Battlestar Galactica, The A-Team).

To protect David from the venomous snakes, Dr. Stoner injects the eager assistant with "antibiotics" which immediately brings a change, which Dr. Stoner insists is normal, in David's appearance and health. The first to notice is Stoner's daughter Kristina (played by Heather Menzies of Sound of Music and Piranha fame) who has grown fond of David which apparently she tends to do with many of her father's assis...um "experiments."

Now you may already see where this is going. The kind Dr. Stoner is actually a mad scientist who is wildly occupied with perfecting a method of turning humans into King Cobras. David is not his first attempt and so far, Dr. Stoner has failed miserably creating several "half human half snake" people which he disposes of by selling to a carnival to be used as part of their sideshow. Somehow Kristina ends up roaming around the carnival at night and comes across "Snake Boy" who she immediately recognizes despite the reptilian dude being completely hairless, blueish green and missing half an arm and both legs. This is easily the most chilling part of the movie.

In the end Stoner finally manages to get it right and turns David into a King Cobra. In turn "King David" turns on the good doctor and swallows him whole. Unfortunately for "King David" (and Kristina who somehow knows that this big ass snake is her boyfriend David) a mongoose from the lab escapes and puts its own "bite" on big Dave essentially bringing a chiling end to the movie.

Does this sound unbelievably too out there to actually exist? All it takes is a quick search on Ebay and you can pick up a copy of the film for probably less than 10 bucks and see for yourself. But I gotta warn you, Sssssss may slither its way into being one of your guilty viewing pleasures!