![]() ![]() Chew does a realistic job of looking totally ambivalent about his task, whether it's the dialogue or the method he employs that's driving that motivation is unclear. Sam Chew is tepid as the tertiary scientist reluctantly seconded to the Mojave desert to provide authorities with a professional opinion on the cause of two suspicious deaths. Talky, clichéd time-filler at best, with little in the way of suspense or action "Rattlers" may not rattle any pacemakers for shock value, and at times tends to look more like a glorified reptile lecture, than a motion picture. ![]() Sounds more exciting than it is, unfortunately. Assigned a freelance photographer (Chauvet) to document evidence, covert enquiries lead the pair to discover that a secret military testing site might be responsible for the apparent aggressiveness of the local rattlesnake population. When a couple of kids vacationing with their family in the desert are discovered deceased without apparent cause, an eminent herpetologist (Chew) is recruited to assist baffled police. I actually liked the opening scene with the two little boys the best, but it was pretty much all downhill from there. However, this scene is neither scary nor sexy-laughably stupid perhaps. The most famous scene involves a young housewife being attacked in the bathtub. (Your snake-fighting tax dollars at work, I guess). Then during the climax of the film they suddenly take off to Vegas to whoop it up while the rattlers run amok. They sleep in a tent for no other reason than to wake up surrounded by snakes. For some reason, these two geniuses seem to do all their hunting at night (when you're hunting rattlers I guess you don't want them to see you coming). The sexist professor insists that his job is no place for a woman, even though, aside from the snakes, all he really does is drive around the Mojave Desert, and I don't know what the female photographer is supposed to be photographing. But speaking of incredibly stupid, the heroes are a male chauvinist herpetology professor and a feminist photographer, who of course fall madly in love while hunting down the killer snakes. They couldn't really afford too many snakes or the special effects to create venom-bloated corpses, so they substituted a bunch of nonsense about military tests making the rattlesnakes go crazy (although they never explain why the snakes all hunt in packs or how they sneak up on their incredibly stupid victims). It's kind of the "Plan 9 from Outer Space" of killer snake movies. They have yet to make a good horror movie about poisonous snakes, but this 70's anti-classic is so bad it almost approaches goodness. ![]()
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