Elephants, Snakes, and CHUDs? Oh, my!

The Descent
Neil Marshall, 2005

The Descent is a movie about eight women, their lives, their loves, the memories, and their attempt to spelunk a cave no man has ever spelunked before. Our characters are a dazzling mix of fascinating types, like the one whose husband and daughter just died and is having trouble moving on, the buff one, the two maybe lesbian ones, the one who implicitly trusts the buff one and lives, or doesn’t, to regret it, and the rest. The movie doesn’t waste much time before they’re all crawling around in a cave. It’s dark, it’s scary, and it’s moody as Hell. Really, the filmmakers do one Hell of a job making this the claustrophobic suspense fest you’d hope it would be. Our heroines deal with your standard spelunking issues, you know, getting lost, getting stuck in a crevice, almost dying in a cave in, and one of them falling far enough to break her leg such that the bone sticks out (and they show it)! Then things take a turn. The girls start to hear things. They start seeing things too. Yep, you guessed it, the cave’s full of mutated, inbred, cannibalistic, humanoid underground dwellers. From here on out, it’s a slaughter fest as the CHUDs, who look like Gollum’s brother, who spends a lot of time at the gym, eat a couple of girls and then get their asses kicked by a couple of more. The girls fight, the girls die, and some of them begin a metaphorical, emotional descent once they realize what the audience realized in the first five minutes: that the buff one slept with their dead husband (before he died, natch’). It’s good, suspenseful stuff, that even includes the biggest pool of blood this side of the first Evil Dead. Still, it all might have worked better without the CHUDs.

Rating: Decent.

The Protector
Prachya Pinkaew, 2005

If you’re like me, and I know I am, you’ve spent the last several years of your life wondering what it would be like if some ad wizard managed to forcefully mate Operation: Dumbo Drop with Rumble in the Bronx. Thankfully, Thai filmmaker, whose work I’ve never seen, has teamed with Tony Jaa, the action sensation that’s sweeping the Thai nation, and whose work I’ve also never seen, have teamed up to do just that with The Protector. Tony is the epynonomous protector, whose family has raised and protected elephants for generations. Unfortunately, Tony is pretty shitty at his job and, of the three elephants he’s charged to protect, one, the mommy, gets shot by poachers or something. Way to go, Tony. Still, Tony and Tony’s Grandpa decide to take their leftovers to town and display them for the Thai king. You see, the whole point of raising and protecting these pachyderms is so that the king can have the perfect elephant to ride into battle, thus imbuing him with the spiritual power of the elephant. Don’t worry, if you actually see the movie, it still doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, some goons for the Generic Asian Mafia stand in for the king’s dudes and steal Tony’s elephants and shoot his grandfather. Way to protect, Tony! After a couple of random fight scenes, Tony follows his elephants to Sydney, Australia, where a dragon lady type has the elephants in hopes of gaining their special elephant powers or whatever. Tony runs around and gets to shout, “Where the Hell are my elephants?” a couple of times and gets into random fights with the police, a group of extreme sports enthusiasts, the patrons and guards of a suspiciously huge, four story VIP dining room behind a one story restaurant, and a big beefy guy who could give the Rick Flair a run for his money. In the end, Tony finds his elephants, but with a confusing twist, and beats up some more people with the sort of chop sockey you’d expect. Random is the name of the game for The Protector, a movie where nothing is connected and the plot makes only as much sense as it absolutely has to. Oh, and there’s a B story about police corruption in Sydney. Or something.

Rating: Elephants? Really?

Snakes on a Plane
David R. Ellis, 2006

I’m thrilled to say that Snakes on a Plane stands in the proud tradition Re-Animator and Evil Dead 2, B horror movies that know exactly what they are and intend to not take themselves too seriously. Of course, Snakes on a Plane takes this to a certain post modern extreme, but I won’t get into that too much here. What is important is that, for the first time anywhere, we have mother fucking snakes on a mother fucking plane. Really, it’s all Sean’s fault. You see, Sean was out BMXing on the Hawaiian islands when he saw his friendly neighborhood Asian drug lord playing piñata with some dude, by which I mean using the dude as a piñata. Anyway, this would tend to incriminate said drug lord, so he sends henchmen to kill Sean, but Sean is saved at the last second by Samuel L. Jackson. Sam convinces Sean to testify and its on a plane headed for the mainland. Of course, the drug lord can hardly let this sort of thing slip and so, instead of doing something sensible, like blowing up the plane or sending goons after Sean, he fills the plane full of poisonous snakes all hopped up on the goofballs. From here on out, everything you’d wish would happen in a movie called Snakes on a Plane happens. First off, you see every snake from Black Mamba to Anaconda going to town on the passengers. You get your standard assortment of stereotypical flight attendants, including the slutty one, the gay one, the one who’s only a few days away from retirement, and the sensible Karen Black-type one in Julianna Margulies, who spends most of the film saying to herself, “How the Hell did I end up in this movie?” Anyway, what else happens? Oh, an anaconda eats a guy whole. Snakes fall out of the ceiling with the air masks. Someone joins the mile high club. Someone gets killed by snakes while joining the mile high club. A world kickboxing champion just happens to be a passenger and saves a woman. A dog gets eaten. There’s a womanizing co-pilot who tries to fly the plane with an arm the size of a beach ball. A snake bites a boob. A snake bites a wiener. All this and trademark blaction from Samuel L. What more could you want?

Rating: Mother fucking snakes on a mother fucking plane!