Python (2000)

• Directed by Richard Clabaugh
• Written by Chris Neal, Gary Hershberger and Paul J.M. Bogh
• Starring
  • Frayne Rosanoff
  • Robert Englund
  • Casper Van Dien
  • William Zabka
  • Wil Wheaton
• Produced by Jeffery Beach, Kenneth Olandt and Phillip Roth
• Executive produced by Jim Hollensteiner, Thomas J. Niedermeyer Jr. and Richard Smith

Before we start examining this movie, we have to quickly examine the larger context in which it was produced, giant snake movies, of which there have been a surprising number. Question: Why, exactly? Answer: Because low-budget creature features nowadays rely on CGI for their special effects, and snakes are easy to animate. Fewer moving parts, you know. That makes huge snakes a good fallback monster, even if the premise lacks some of the novelty that other creature features use as their main selling point (for instance, I believe there has only been one zombie mammoth movie).

The two pre-credits scenes are a good indication of where this movie is going. In the first, a plane coming back stateside from Southeast Asia hits a rough storm just over California, and the pilot (familiar character actor Ed Lauter) has the co-pilot (even more familiar character actor Marc McClure) check on the shifting cargo, which is a single huge mysterious crate. The co-pilot sees something moving through the slats in the crate, and on the pilot’s orders pries back a slat to check it out; the next thing you know, something is loose in the cabin, and the plane goes down in the mountains. The second scene is that old standby, Horny Campers, but just to play with genre conventions, this tent is occupied by two lesbians, Lisa and Roberta (LoriDawn Messuri and Kathleen Lambert), whose obligatory fight is over the fact that one of them is still bisexual. (And owns a normal-sized python.) Don’t get too used to them; they each scream and die while staring into a fast-moving camera.

And there’s plenty of subtext to be mined from two lesbians who take a snake camping… but I really don’t want to go there.

So already, we’ve managed to check off four deaths, two breasts, a thunderstorm, an explosion, and an actor who’s been on Star Trek. Bingo!

Our protagonist is John Cooper (Frayne Rosanoff), who left the small town of Ruby for an abortive attempt at a career as a professional cyclist; he’s now back, working for his older brother Brian (Chris Owens) who took over the family plating plant when their father died (a plating plant filled with vats of acid that will in no way become important in the movie’s climax, seriously, nuh-uh). Problems in his life: 1) Brian sees him as something of a returned prodigal and a screw-up. 2) John’s main squeeze before he left town, Kristin (Dana Barron), had become engaged to Sheriff’s Deputy Greg (William Zabka, forever known as “Johnny” from The Karate Kid (1984)) in John’s absence, but now that John’s back, Greg’s gotten thrown over, and it’s never good to have small town law enforcement with a grudge against you. 3) John’s best friend is Tommy, played by Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton trying desperately to play against type, with dyed purple hair and a nipple ring.

Boldly going, after a fashion.

Meanwhile, in another location, two other B-movie stalwarts get together: Herpetologist Dr. Anton Rudolph (Robert Englund), part of the organization bringing the cargo plane in from Southeast Asia, is grilled by Special Agent Parker (Casper Van Dien) of the NSA. (Note: The NSA deals mostly with cryptology and intelligence security so I don’t know how they’d be involved here, and a career spook wouldn’t dress in the upscale casual wardrobe that Van Dien wears. Plus, Van Dien’s mustache makes him look like he’s gearing up for a Freddy Mercury biopic.) The python in the crate on the plane wasn’t just a python, it was a SUPER-HOLY-COW-python discovered in the jungle: 129 feet long, capable of speeds up to 50 miles per hour, with special glands in its upper throat the collect stomach juices and allow it to spit acid (an ability only used once, and good, because the CG rendering was horrendous), and more brains than most registered voters. One wonders how exactly the snake was captured in the first place, and why it was placed in a wooden crate when it later shows the ability to knock through airplane fuselage.

Parker’s plan is to capture/kill it quickly, before any civilians even know there’s a danger, but that may not be possible because the campers’ bodies start turning up. The medical examiner (diminutive John Franklin, once the creepy kid in Children of the Corn (1984)) identifies the semi-fleshless corpses as having been dissolved by acid, and Deputy Greg had seen John with Lisa’s pet snake, which wandered off from their campsite — John, who has access to vats of acid. Do they have a bizarre killer on their hands?

“I am not too pretty to be a spook!”

What’s most refreshing about this movie is that the characters aren’t as dumb as stumps, mainly because (this is a secret that most horror filmmakers have yet to recognize and apply consistently) they aren’t simple stereotypes. I’m not saying that anyone is drawn with great depth and poignancy, but too many horror movies are filled with stock caricatures — the Jock, the Bimbo, the Nerd, the Rebel, the African-American, etc. — which are so removed from reality, especially in any scenario which has them all in one social circle, that they can only behave artificially in a story situation beyond their normal interactions like, say, one involving a giant snake. By contrast, the central characters in Python, while not particularly deep, are naturalistic. (At least the ones from Ruby; Special Agent Parker and Dr. Rudolph are stock B-movie characters, but their presence is a necessity for the genre.)

Remember the subtext I didn’t want to get into with the lesbians and the snake? Times a bazillion.

There’s evidence that the script betrays the kind of producer tampering that often afflicts movies of this budget range, where dicta of “Put this in! Take this out!” seem to be determined by the randomness of a Twister game. For instance, John and Greg obviously start out with enmity; then, when John’s hit the breaking point, the two of them solve their differences like men: they beat the bejeezus out of each other, in a good fight scene that ranges all over a children’s playground. Soon after, when the sheriff reluctantly hauls John in for suspicion of murder, Greg tells Kristin that he doesn’t think John did it, and he’s going to try to help him. It’s a great arc for the two characters, but in the next scene John gets released anyway, because the NSA has shown up with a cockamamie story about an escaped ex-Special Forces convict who’s behind the killings. It seems a lot of effort to set something up which then gets short-circuited.

On the other hand, even if some of the macro elements are mishandled and the CGI is a little dodgy, there are little details almost like Easter eggs that lighten the whole thing. Like Tommy making a background reference to possibly going to Crystal Lake to camp. Or like Tommy’s girlfriend Theresa (Sara Mornell) in the shower, defending herself from the snake with every makeshift weapon at hand — including squirting shampoo in its eyes, only to look at the label and discover it’s “no tears formula.” (Also, when Theresa quickly wraps and tucks a bath towel around herself, it stays tucked — through a bathroom attack, vehicle accident, and steeplechase.)

I just love it when screencaps come pre-captioned.

Back in the dim prehistory of the internet when I started the first precursor site to this one, I had a vision for the kind of B-movies I would concentrate on: unambitious but competent genre entertainment that knew its position in the cinema totem pole and was fine with just rounding the bases. The purview of this site as grown since then, but appreciation for those dazzlingly adequate popcorn flicks is still a central impetus behind Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Python is exactly the kind of movie that I was envisioning in those long-ago days: it has second-rate aspirations and fulfills them handily.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 13
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• spring-loaded cats: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 6
  • Wil Wheaton (Tommy) is best known for his role as “Wesley Crusher” on TNG
  • Sara Mornell (Theresa) played “Carson” in the DS9 episode “Starship Down”
  • Sean Whalen (“Deputy Ross,” the other deputy) played “Zoumas” in the Enterprise episode “Canamar”
  • David Bowe (“Boone,” one of the plating employees) played “Basso” in the DS9 episode “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”
  • John Franklin (Floyd the medical examiner) played “Kipp” in the Voyager episode “Critical Care”
  • Ed Lauter (the ill-fated pilot) played “Lt. Cmdr. Albert” in the TNG/ episode “The First Duty”