Snakes on a Plane Hits the Ground Burning

To keep with the habit of blogs musing over Snakes on a Plane, I offer up my first post on the subject.

Fellow bloggers, all of your hype was in vain. You didn't even see the movie, did you? You couldn't have. Sure, it made it to #1 in its first week, but it grossed just about half of what the industry execs had anticipated, and in its second week it has plummeted to #7, having only cumulatively grossed $26,319,390. I mean, hell, I'd take that, but considering the relentless internet marketing frenzy, all the parodies, all the buzz, I would have expected Snakes on A Plane to hover on the top for the rest of the summer.

Last week, Little Miss Sunshine was in S.O.A.P.'s current position at #7, but has blasted upwards to #3. Goes to show you that pre-release buzz is nearly meaningless if all you've got is a cleverly kitschy title. On the other hand, if there's no embryonic suspense for a film's release, than all you can bank on is the quality and integrity of the film itself and hope enough people see it to spread the word far and wide. Little Miss Sunshine is a perfect example of this much more rewarding scenario. This is not to say that people won't go see a shitty movie; you just have to deliver what the audience expects. Snakes on a Plane apparently failed at being a complete disaster. How difficult could that have been? Not very. We wanted camp. We wanted Sam Jackson loud and Black Panthered, instead we get the all-too-effortless: "I'm sick of these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane." Sure, some guy gets a disproportionate circumcision from a toilet-dwelling snake, but the word is that the movie's just a mediocre action flick and fails at the overkill we all had hoped for. The word is not good, but it's still far-reaching. I for one was waiting for the reviews to hit, and they all had gone something like this: "Snakes on a Plane fails to be as bad as it could have been." So put me on the list of people who were kind of into the idea, but didn't go because the camp was intentional and never went as far as it should have. This could have opened up the Hollywood gates to explorations in the outer-reaches of taste and the entertainment value of the B movie. Thanks for fuckin' it up for us, David Ellis (director). Stick to stunts, and leave the filmmaking to the real muthafuckers. As for the Snakes on a Plane writers, you've proven to us that one writer is better than four.