Sharknado is old hat. Lavalantula? Passé. Supergator? Consider yourself retired. If you’re a fan of objectively bad films with stupid names about large animals, which you’ll watch drunk one night because it sounds funny (only to immediately realise that you much prefer films with things like plot and production design), you are in for a treat. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Snake Outta Compton.
I mean, I could just stop there. Really, the title is all you need to know about Snake Outta Compton. There’s a snake – and let’s presume, given our affinity with the genre, that it’s quite a big snake – and it terrorises Compton. The end. We can also assume that the title came long before the film, and that the budget is so tiny that we’ll only actually see the snake in about three scenes.
Snake Outta Compton couldn’t have come at a better time. The bargain-bin monster-movie genre has exhausted itself on a diet of empty calories, with every new film combining big animals and meteorological phenomena to ever more ludicrous extremes, until it has found itself with nowhere left to go. So thank god that Snake Outta Compton has found a way out, by splicing its self-aware silliness with the DNA of a well-liked serious movie. Make no mistake, you’re looking at the future here. Let’s break down the trailer:
1) Again, you probably don’t need to watch the film after seeing this still. “Big-ass snake climbs Uppercase Records building” reads the ticker beneath some GNN news footage. That’s basically Snake Outta Compton summed up, isn’t it? But wait! We haven’t actually seen the snake yet, have we?
2) Oh fine then, here it is. And it’s doing battle with some fighter jets – although it doesn’t really look big enough to warrant that level of military response. You could probably get the job done with some tranquilliser darts and a big net. But wait! We don’t know how the big snake came to be yet, do we?
3) Oh, that’s how. A man zapped it with a ray gun. But why Compton? What stories specific to Compton will this giant snake facilitate? What sort of richly drawn tales of urban deprivation will come from the introduction of the big serpent?
4) Oh. Apparently one of the stories will involve a white lady with a bandana who screeches things in hip-hop clubs. Well, maybe we can write this off as a moment of slightly-too-broad comic relief. What else?
5) There’s also the story about a white man who has cornrows and a mesh T-shirt and what appears to be a solid gold AK-47. I mean, I’ve never been to Compton, but I don’t doubt the veracity of these characters for a moment.
6) In fact, this last guy is the catalyst for the entire plot. When he fires his AK-47, a stray bullet smashes a tank and allows the snake to escape. And finally, after more teasing than any of us could demand, we can get to the good part of the trailer. The part where all the special-effects shots are smashed together to make the film appear much less boring than it inevitably will be.
7) So here we go. Here’s the Jurassic Park rip-off scene. Which is no real surprise. After all, didn’t Jurassic Park basically invent the form that allowed Snake Outta Compton? If anything, this is more of a tribute than a rip-off.
8) Here’s the scene where a man gets graphically devoured by the snake. Hooray! Again, clear nods to the part of Jurassic Park where the guy gets eaten off a toilet.
9) And here’s the scene where … Hold on, I think it’s a scene where a puts his hand down a toilet, but the snake is hiding down the toilet, and it bites his hand off, and somehow an inordinately large amount of blood is produced. Yay?
10) And finally, it would be remiss not to include a scene depicting what happens in about 70% of the Straight Outta Compton trailer; a load of people shouting “OHHHH!” like Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys.
So this is the future of the monster movie. Let’s all cross our fingers and pray that Snake Outta Compton does well, because that will surely pave the way for other films like The Grand Barracudapest Hotel and Hacksaw Midge and A Streetcar Named Deshirehorse and … Oh God, these are all brilliant ideas. Someone get me a direct line to Hollywood.
