Ricky Flowers Jr., Motown Maurice, Donte Essien, Aurelia Michael, Joston Theney, Jon Kondelik, Tarkan Dospil, Eric Paul Erickson, Samuel Jackson’s lawyer, Denzel Washington’s lawyer, the SyFy Channel’s lawyers, and the NAACP’s lawyers.
More details here.
WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW
THE ANGLE:
A familiar mother-effing voice is heard as a snake is tossed from a passing airliner over sunny Los Angeles. The snake lands on the hood of LAPD Officers Denz (Theny) and Ethan (Kondelik) who are out on a training day patrolling the streets of Compton in South Central LA.
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| "We're about as subtly named as King Kong!" |
Denz and Ethan wipe the snake from their windshield as if it's nothing and go about their business. They will soon regret the decision. Meanwhile, science nerd and also subtly named Vurkel (Essien) finds the snake on the road and takes one of its intact eggs for an experiment.
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| Yes, you fucking did that! |
Vurkel goes to his laboratory in a house he shares with this roommate Pinball (Maurice) who aspires to be in a rap group along with the alluring Neon (Michael) and vocalists Beez Neez (Dospil) and Cam (Flowers).
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| Day Players with Attitude |
Pinball's rap group is set to audition for a big recording contract but Vurkel is annoyed by their constant partying and bullying. He experiments with the snake egg in his room and exposes it to some kind of weird sciencey ray gun thing. Unfortunately, the experiment results in the creation of a big ass snake that's hungry for homies.
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| Snake? I thought you were dead. |
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| Less Eminem, more Almond Joy |
Broke and desperate, Pinball and Beez Neez dress up as Mexican wrestlers and plan a series of robberies to get Jaws' money quick.
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| Always worked for me. |
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| Mike Mendez as Mexican Ice Cream Man is the role of a lifetime. |
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| I just couldn't, so here's a pic of a young and comely Elsa Lanchester. |
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| Welcome to Jurassic Korean Grocery Parking Lot! |
After being bitten by his giant ass snake, Vurkel gets the TMNT treatment and begins to spread a violent virus.
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| Still better than Super Mario Bros. |
So the final stage is set and Pinball and his crew will have to confront the snake atop the recording studio building and kill it with the most inhumane weapon known to man.
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| 'Nuff said. |
THE FINISHER:
Being the avid bad movie watcher that I am and will always be known to be (wipes tear), I’m often asked about how I feel about the SyFy Original line-up of craptastic fare. You know, the Sharknados, the Shartopusses, and other such stuff. Lord knows, I’ve seen my share, like this one and this one. And the answer I give is the same as the one I give to those who ask me about other terrible Z-grade movie brands like the Asylum, Troma, or DC Entertainment: I don’t care for bad on purpose. What I mean is that the prime factors – inept acting, ridiculous plotting, second-rate FX – are manufactured to fit the bad movie mold. The badness, for lack of a better term, feels artificial and forced. A true bad movie experience should be void of intentionality; the incompetence should sweep you off your feet and carry to a higher plane of mockery, gratification, and self-hatred, like a pitch meeting with Tara Reid. Add to that the pre-conditioned response of “Well, what did you expect? It’s supposed to be bad!”, that audiences have about these movies don’t motivate producers to aim for anything above the punny title. Unfortunately, this type of attitude is being applied to films in general nowadays, which may spell doom for movie-going in general. But to answer the question of what did I expect watching something called Snake Outta Compton? I expected to chuckle a bit. I expected at least one good kill. I expected it to pass the time.
But to be honest, deep down inside I expected it to be entertaining, perhaps even good. Maybe expected isn’t the word; call it hope. Hell, a movie with a cameo from the great Mike Mendez, maestro of such fun and rewatchable SyFy works like Big Ass Spider and Lavalantula amongst other fine horror films, can’t be all bad. But Snake Outta Compton is pretty bad. The production feels rushed, even though its main reference is a movie from three years ago, to say nothing about the seventeen-year-old Training Day references. The comedic acting falls somewhere between the last Scary Movie and anything dragging along the bloated comedy corpse of Rob Schneider. Fortunately, it avoids being grossly stereotypical given its setting, but the terrible 90s jokes, South Central references, and rapper puns reek of some white dude writer who ran lines via text past his one black writer friend who also went to Yale. That, or cocaine. Actually, I see that four people wrote the script. Hope there was plenty of coke to go around. But the news isn’t all bad. Like I said I did laugh a few times and I liked the fact that this served as a tongue-in-cheek sequel to Snakes on a Plane. But I shuddered at the thought that since there is a pencil-thin link between Lionsgate, the distributor of this film, and Universal Studios, the once-distributor of older Lionsgate titles, the Compton Snake could be considered a Universal Monster. Let that sink in! Ridiculousness aside, I can recommend Snake Outta Compton for your Halloween night marathon. It’ll wake your guests up and arrive as a welcome relief after a long night of being terrorized by ElePhantom*, LavaRats vs. RoboRaccoons*, and Helk: The Elk from Hell*.
*These movies do not exist, but SyFy if you’re interested – call me!
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