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Snakes in Movies   Calamity of Snakes (1982)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   Extra Spoiler Alert - I'm going to talk about most of the movie, including the ending. This is a Taiwan-made snakes-run-amok horror movie with some comedy thrown in, that's basically a snake snuff movie. If you don't like watching lots of live snakes killed and tortured, you should probably watch something else or watch the censored version that's available on the Unearthed Films blue-ray that was released in 2023. I didn't enjoy the unnecessary violence, but I was mesmerized by the sheer number of snakes and scenes with snakes attacking humans. Subtlety is not in this movie's vocabulary. It's pure snakesploitation. Snakes are seen in most of the movie and it probably has the most snakes ever used in a movie that's a work of fiction. (There may be more snakes in some documentaries, such as those about the garter snake dens in Canada.) To my snake eyes, it looks like they used even more snakes than were used in The Craft (1996) whose director says they used 10,000 snakes and tried to have the most snakes ever in one shot, but he might have been exaggerating. (The Craft was made 14 years after this movie, and I wonder if its filmmakers had seen it.) Like the martial artists in Chinese Wuxia movies, the snakes here have some unusual powers, such as the ability to fly through the air at will, and the ability to appear instantly from out of nowhere and kill people quickly. Most of the time, however, they just lie on the floor, probably wondering why humans keep stepping on them. The snakes are led by giant pythons that can fly through the air and fight with the skill of a martial arts master, using the tail like a whip or like a fist. At the beginning of the movie we see a group of construction workers looking down into a large hole full of live snakes and eggs. We are supposed to believe that the snakes were just lying there under the ground brooding their eggs when they were uncovered by the diggers (as absurd as that may be.) The boss, Fu Ren, tells his men to kill all the snakes. He joins them in the carnage by operating a large steam shovel that he uses to crush the snakes in the hole. We see shots of real snakes getting crushed and bloody, not just once, but again and again and again. We also see men with shovels cutting and killing live snakes, choppin them into pieces. Again and again. This snake kill overkill happens throughout the movie. The boss's wife cries to him to stop killing the snakes or they will get revenge but he doesn't listen. As we will see, she was not wrong about that. I know I'm not supposed to sympathize with the killer animals in a horror movie, but since the person responsible bringing on the snake attack is a corrupt land developer who's willing to endanger the lives of his tenants by cutting corners in the building's construction, I found it hard not to root for the snakes in their fight against him and his henchmen. A man with a lot of skinned snakes hanging next to him in an outdoor food market demonstrates how to kill a cobra while it's still alive to a small crowd. He cuts it, then peels its skin down its body, then he drains its blood and gallbladder and we see its still beating heart. Some people in the crowd drink the blood, which he claims will make old men virile. None of the snake killing was faked. We see him skin a real live snake alive. Eating snake meat and drinking their blood is apparently a part of life in Taiwan. I've seen this in other Chinese movies. It's disgusting to see a snake skinned alive, but since the snakes are being prepared for food and medicine and they most likely came from breeding facilities like any other kind of meat for human consumption, I can't complain too much about the snake food market massacre. (We have also seen scenes of cows killed in slaughterhouses in movies, but they were not skinned alive!) We also see a group of men in a bar drinking and eating snake meat. Towards the end of the movie we see a large dinner table covered with vengeful snakes that are not there to be food, they're there to be served - which I though was a nice contrast. A man and a woman take off their clothes and hit the sheets for a quick slap and tickle, but before they can make the beast with two backs, an army of vengeful snakes swarms in and interrupts their horizontal mambo. The snakes are definitely not in the mood for love. Two small animals (badgers, I think) are put in a room with a few snakes, but the reason is not explained. Maybe it's supposed to be a part of the developer's efforts to kill off the snakes, but it's really just more gratuitous violence against snakes for our entertainment. We see real badgers, biting, killing and eating real snakes. Unlike the typical cobra vs. mongoose fights we see in other movies, with men betting on the outcome, these fights are not a sport. There is no audience except us, and the snakes don't put up much of a fight, maybe because they're not venous species. I'd bet on the badgers every time in this matchup. The developer's men talk to a snake expert who tells them he has never heard of organized snakes attacking people. He says they are being led by a large python and that he knows someone who can defeat it. Cut to two women in bikinis in a nightclub act putting snakes into the top of a box. (Where can I get tickets to this show?) The sides of the box fall down to reveal a man up to his neck in a giant pile of snakes. He pushes the snakes to the floor then slowly pulls a little snake out of his mouth by its tail. Then he makes the snake bite him on the tip of his tongue. This is the snake master the snake expert was talking about. The sleazy developer's even sleazier right hand man tells him they will pay him a lot of money if he can get rid of the giant python, and next we see how he earns his paycheck. We see the snake master alone in a large warehouse. A snake on the floor rushes towards him so he crushes it to death with his feet (for real - we see it break in two pieces in another unnecessarily violent shot.) Then we see three more snakes fly up towards his head. He catches one in his mouth, a second snake wraps around his hand, and he kung-fu kicks the third snake into a pole. He bites the snake in his mouth to death then he holds each end of the other snake and pulls it apart. He literally rips a live snake in two! Please don't try that at home! Then he sees the python and the main event begins. The snake flies out of a pile of boxes after him, he grabs a hatchet out of his pants, and chops at the snake. The python flies through the air and bites him on the face, leaving his face and hands a bloody mess. Then the python wraps around his body to crush him. The fight goes on on for quite a while. Eventually the man throws a rope over come ceiling beams then manages to tie it around the python and pull it up to the ceiling, where it hangs to death. We see the python's bloody body carried away at the end. It's so long that it takes seven men to carry it. But after everybody leaves we see a second giant python on the floor, even more pissed than the first one. Some time in the future after the apartment building is finished, we see some of the residents having a party to celebrate the grand opening. Down in the garage, a giant python smashes through the floor, shaking the whole building like an earthquake. When the man at the front desk goes to the garage to investigate, he is dragged into a hole in the floor by the python. Then snakes start flying out of the hole one by one until they nearly fill the whole garage. From the garage they start moving upstairs to the rest of the building. It's lke a Tsunami of snakes. The snakes we see are obviously being thrown out of the hole by some poor animal wrangler down in the hole. Again, they don't just throw one or two snakes out of the hole, they throw snake after snake for nearly thirty seconds, with crazy electronic music and strange kung-fu-like sound effects accompanying the snake launching. This repetition is justified since they are showing us that there is a massive army of snakes coming into the building. A man tries to leave the garage in his car but the snakes cover the car and break through his windshield. He tries to drive away, crushing a lot of snakes with his tires, but he can't get away. This is another time when we see actual bloody snake carnage. We see a shot of a car tire actually driving over dozens of live snakes, leaving a pile of bloody bodies. And in case anybody missed it, they show the same shot again with a different tire and more crushed snakes. The snakes pour into the lobby of the building and then into the elevator when it reaches the ground floor. Three elevator passengers are overtaken by snakes and bitten. They all die, falling onto the lobby floor after rolling around in agony with the snakes wrapped around their bodies. The rolling around is supposed to make it look like the snakes are really attacking them, but it's pretty obvious that the snakes are not really interested in the people at all and the actors are holding the snakes and wrapping them around themselves to make it look like they're under attack. An attractive young woman in the building decides to get naked and take a nice relaxing hot bath in her brand new tub, but a swarm of angry killer snakes have the same idea and we all know what happens when you try to mix naked women in bathtubs with killer snakes. The bubble bath turns into a blood bath. An old woman in a wheelchair is knitting alone in her living room while her husband sleeps, when the snakes swarm onto her and her husband, killing them both. On the bright side, her kids don't have to pretend to like the homemade sweaters she gives them next Christmas. The snake army eventually reaches the large party crowd. Snakes fill the hallways, cover the tables, and pour out of the only exit door, killing as many people as they can. Again, the actors grab snakes, hold them up in the air, roll around covering themselves with snakes, and do other things to try to make the sluggish snakes look like they are actively attacking, but I wasn't fooled. We see some very horrible bloody deaths, and a lot of great snake faces from the actors, but even though people who are afraid of snakes might find these scenes to be terrifying, the overall result for me was more comedy than horror, other than the horror of the real snake killings. In one of the most unnecessarily cruel and violent sequences in the movie, Fu Ren, the sleazy developer responsible for the calamity of snakes, hears screaming and runs up to his apartment where he finds his wife rolling around on the floor covered with snakes and her own blood. Snakes start flying through the room towards him so he grabs a Samurai sword that is conveniently nearby and starts cutting the snakes in two. (These are real live snakes that some snake wrangler is throwing at the actor, and he is literally slicing them in half with the sword.) Shots of him slicing snake after snake are intercut with scenes of his wife rolling around on the floor screaming, and shots of dead snakes on the carpet. It ends with shots of the bloody bodies of mutilated snakes that are still writhing around on the floor, including a shot of a still-beating snake heart through a hole in the body, as we hear the woman screaming along with cheesy kung-fu sword-swishing sound effects. I have been rooting for the snakes for the entire movie, but seeing this, I'm now hoping to see the snakes give Fu Ren what's coming to him. F.U. Fu. And I don't have to wait long for that, because downstairs we see a man looking through the lobby's glass doors where he sees all the snakes and dead bodies. He runs away to a phone booth and called the fire department. (Phone booths. Remember those?) At the beginning of the movie, it looked like the architect working for Fu Ren was going to be the hero of the film. Like most heroes, he's the typical good-looking leading man, his character has principles, and he's romantically involved with the boss's daugher, but he never does anything heroic. In the end the firefighters are the real heroes. They show up in their trucks and protective suits and start spraying some kind of smoke on the snakes, as if they know what they're doing. As if they do this every day. (Fu Ren first told his men to call the fire department about the snakes on the construction site, before he ordered them to kill them all, so maybe they have done this before. Maybe thousands of snakes on a rampage is an every day occurence in Taiwan.) After the smoke, the firefighters start using flamethrowers. It's strange watching firefighters burning things with fire (like in Farenheit 451) but there's nothing funny about seeing real fire burning real snakes, which is what we see. And, as usual, they show this snake barbecuing again and again. The firefighters gradually spray their way upstairs, hacking snakes with axes and shoveling piles of snake corpses into huge barrels as they go. Then they encounter the giant python and they need to retreat. The python puts up a fierce fight. It throws an entire drum kit from the party band at them. Then it crawls into a large eagle statue and flies like an eagle, knocking some of them down. After a lot of fighting and a lot of flame throwing, they finally set the snake on fire just as Fu Ren comes down the stairs to see the flaming python flying into his face. He tries to cut the snake with his sword, but the snake grabs him. He catches fire and falls to the floor where he burns to death. I was very happy to see the lousy landlord die, and not just because my landlord keeps raising my rent. The movie was obviously made at a time when there were no laws protecting animals used in films in Taiwan, but I've read that they now have some animal protection regulations in place. The real horror of this movie is not all of the actors who are pretending to die from the snakes, it's the hundreds or thousands of snakes we see being killed or injured by the actors. Besides the blatant snake killing, because so many snakes were lying around on the sets where the actors were running and falling, a lot of other snakes were inadvertently stepped on or crushed by falling actors. Even if you hate snakes, it's hard to justify such cruelty just for entertainment. They could have made the movie as it is with fake blood and fake dead snakes. This is where I usually try to identify what kinds of snakes we see in the movie, but I don't know much about Asian snakes. I'm pretty sure that we see Burmese pythons, some cobras, one of which could be a Taiwan Cobra, Taiwan Beauty Snakes, Mandarin Rat Snakes, maybe some Indo-Chinese Rat Snakes, a Many-banded Krait, and some kind of large viper. We also see some piles of snakes that could have contained fake snakes to increase the numbers of snakes in the shot, but it's hard to say if they were live, dead or fake snakes. The scenes with the giant flying fighting python appear to be made with large snake puppets pulled by strings, manipulated by hand, or thrown through the air. I wonder if they got the snakes from snake farms that breed them for food and medicine, like the snakes we saw in the snake market. In mainland China there are lots of huge snake farms that raise millions of snakes, so maybe there are also snake farms in Taiwan, or maybe they imported the snakes from the mainland Chinese farms. Even if that's true, and the snakes were bred to be killed, it still doesn't justify torturing and slaughtering them just for our enjoyment. You can watch the whole movie and read more about it at The Silver Scream. There is also a good review of the "cruelty-free" version of the movie on The Hong Kong Cinema Appreciation Society YouTube channel. The narrator was too squeamish to watch all the snake violence, and I can't blame him. He tells us that they hired snake handlers from China and that they used venomous snakes with their mouths taped shut. They also kept a lot of anti-venin on the set in case anyone was bitten by the venomous snakes, but he didn't know if anyone needed it.