Calamity of Snakes Film Review

This is a legendary Taiwanese horror film that I have heard about for years. It has made it to a good release and fans are finally being able to see it in bright sparkling colors. You can watch this from a few perspectives. You can think it is cool seeing a condo being immersed in hundreds of angry rapacious snakes or you can think it is horrible that they kill hundreds if not thousands of real snakes in cruel ways. Or you are just freaked out by snakes in which case I suggest you stay far away from this film. Far, far away. I am a bit of all three. There are some remarkable scenes of snakes that will bring out the worst in us but the slaughter of live snakes just goes too far. There is like ten minutes of mongooses killing snakes. Other scenes of them being burnt to death or cut to pieces in gory detail. This is one time, I would have preferred CGI.

When there are no snakes on the screen, it is a pretty dull affair. A real estate developer (Kao Yuen) is willing to cut corners for his projects to come in on schedule. When they uncover a den of hundreds of snakes, he gets in a tractor and crushes them all. Snakes apparently have long memories, a communication system and a sense of brotherhood to one another. They start killing some of the people involved in the snake massacre. A scene with a snake master fighting a giant boa is great. The boa is fake. The rest are real.

But the big tour de force is the final thirty minutes of the film. The condo has opened and a big party being given. The disco is alive with dancers, couples are getting romantic, the large woman is gobbling up the buffet. In apartments mahjong is being played, a bath being taken, a little girl being put to bed and a woman in a wheelchair is knitting. This woman is played by Shaw veteran actress Ou-Yang Sha-fei and what happens to this much respected actress is pretty horrible. Thousands of wiggling, squirmy snakes everywhere. How they found enough actors willing to have snakes piled on top of them is a mystery. Where all the snakes came from is just as mysterious.