By Geno McGahee
I have owned SSSSSSS for quite a while and was never able to get into it, but I don’t give up easily and finally sat down and watched it through. Without question, it is a slow burn, but the payoff is totally worth it.
Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin) has a hard on for snakes and believes them to be misunderstood. He reminded me of a mix of Doc from BACK TO THE FUTURE and Grampa from WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. He has hired a college student, David Blake (Dirk Benedict) to assist him with his work. He also has his daughter, Kristina (Heather Menzies-Urich), who has been working with her dad since she was a kid.
As Stoner schools David, he starts making comments about how snakes get a bad name because there are a couple of bad ones. There is no question that this dude relates more to snakes than to people. The biggest object of his worship is a huge king cobra. People gather to see Stoner play with the cobra, avoiding danger and showing the proper respect to this snake.
On top of being a snake expert, he is helping David get immunity to snake venom by injecting him with some medication of some sort. David’s skin starts peeling like a snake, but he thinks nothing of it. He assumes that his doctor friend is helping him out and doing nothing wrong, but he’s quite naïve. If a weird guy that worships snakes wants to shoot you up with shit, you may want to say no or at least consult a doctor before agreeing to it.
David and Kristina start hitting it off, but there is a douchebag lingering around. Steve Randall (Reb Brown), a muscle-bound meathead, is very interested in Kristina and if that means beating David’s ass, he will. At a carnival, he approaches David and starts tossing him around. He grabs him in a bear hug and David starts biting him like a snake, striking his neck with his fangs, before it is broken up. It is hilarious. When they are broken up, David calls Steve a Neanderthal and he screams “I don’t like the sound of that!” What a hilarious line. We knew he was stupid, but they wanted to drive the point home. Steve was a great character.
Not one to easily give up, Steve goes to the house and climbs to the second floor and sneaks into Kristina’s room. He puts his hand down and a python wraps around his arm. He panics, jumps out the window, and then kills the python and calls the family a bunch of crazy snake freaks. We now start to see the evil ways of the doctor. If you don’t want me to spoil this film for you, you may want to stop reading and watch the flick.
Before I go into Stoner’s evil ways, I want to talk about the editing of this film. They cut out all of the nudity…badly. When Kristina and David are skinny dipping, they insert blurry plants to cover their asses and they look so bad. I don’t know why they wouldn’t just cut out the scenes rather than covering Benedict’s ass unless there was something wrong with his ass. Is there something wrong with his ass that would disturb people? Does he have a tramp stamp that was too risqué at the time? Whatever the case, they do what they can to cut out all of the nudity. Damn them. If the filmmaker wanted to show Dirk Benedict’s ass because that was his vision, how dare they cut it out. “My vision! My vision of ass is destroyed!” Poor guy.
David and Kristina are on the verge of getting it on when Stoner gets home and flips out, telling his daughter that she will not have intercourse with David. “Are you the one putting plants over his ass dad,” she boomed…or maybe she didn’t. She thinks that her dad just doesn’t want her getting some, but it turns out that he has been systematically turning David into a snake and that snake man love juice could fuck up his daughter.
Things go from bad to worse as David lies on the floor and moans as he turns into a snake man. Stoner tells him that he is evolving as the poor guy screams in pain. Meanwhile, Kristina goes to the carnival and sees their snake man, who is lying there, crying, and freaks out. She’s putting it together. That snake man must be her dad’s first test subject that he sold to the carnival. That’s so fucked up. I hope he didn’t rape the snake man, but he probably did. He loved snakes so much that there is at least the potential that it became a fetish. They should have named this movie “COBRA FETISH” or “LET ME SUCK YOUR COBRA”. That’s a lot easier to say than “SSSSSSS”.
It was surprising to see that David turned into a snake completely. I expected a crazy snake man running around and kicking ass, but he turned into an actual snake and a regular sized one. You’d expect him to become a huge snake if he was turning into one, but maybe making a huge snake wasn’t in the budget. Stoner rejoices that he now has a snake with a human brain and throws that into the face of his king cobra, who doesn’t take it so well.
Kristina comes back and finds David, who is now a king cobra, fighting with a honey badger, and screams and we freeze frame as they often did in the 1970s. I fucking love the ending freeze frame scenes they used to do. Why don’t they do that anymore?
SSSSSSS is an awesome movie. It takes a bit to get going, but once it does, it’s highly entertaining. It’s crazy and silly but well worth a watch and if you’re not laughing as you watch this, you haven’t drank enough. OK, I was half in the bag watching this one. I would have liked it sober too…I think.
