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Snakes in Movies   I Dreamed of Africa (2000)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   For fans of snakes in movies this one is not to be missed, since it includes numerous appearances by snakes along with scenes of capturing and even releasing snakes. I watched it because I'd read that there were a lot of snakes in it, but found it to be a very interesting movie, certainly much better than its online ratings. It's based on the 1991 autobiography of Kuki Gallmann, also named "I Dream of Africa." Kuki (played by Kim Bassinger) moved to Kenya with her son Emanuele from a previous husband and her new husband to start a cattle ranch. After both of them died, she stayed in Africa with her daughter and eventually turned the ranch into a conservation park to try to stop the poaching of elephants. We saw early on that the young Emanuele was fond of snakes when they were living in Italy and he drew a snake on Kuki's cast after she broke her leg in an automobile accident. After they get to Africa he finds a baby python on the ground outside their house and keeps it as a pet naming it Kaaa after the python in The Jungle Book. Apparently, snakes in Kenya just lie around on the ground waiting for someone to pick them up, because Emanuele finds another one that way next to a creek and meets a boy there who has one just like it. The boys become friends and Emanuele shows off his snake collection. Emanuele goes off to boarding school in the city leaving Kuki to care for the snakes. She's not allowed to visit him in person at the school thanks to strict British school regulations, so she secretly hides a message for him in a pile of rocks outside the school. When Emanuele retrieves it we find out it's a polaroid of his mother holding his python. After Emanuele is grown and comes home from school he is accepted to Stanford University so Kuki has a going away party for him. During the party we see him and some visitors run and catch a large python in a water hole. They measure it at 13.5 feet in length. We see that Emanuele's collection now includes venomous snakes when we see him milking a viper of its venom. Kuki finds out he's keeping venomous snakes, including some spitting cobras, and scolds him demanding that he get rid of the "poisonous snakes." But of course he doesn't. In any movie when we see this many appearances of snakes and we see someone handling venomous snakes it means that we have been set up to see someone die of snake bite. That's exactly what happens here, except that this time it's based on fact and not just lazy writing - Emanuele really did die of a bite from one of his pet snakes at the age of 17. We see him remove a thick glove and prepare to milk what Kuki later says is a Puff Adder, but it slips out of his control and bites him on the hand. We don't see the bite, only his reaction and his foaming at the mouth death before they could get him to a hospital. In her eulogy at his funeral, Kuki says she'll continue to see Emanuele in all the beautiful things in life - in every flower, bird, sunset, and crawling snake. Then, in a very touching and remarkable scene, she and the funeral party walk down to a creek carrying some snakes in hand and in bags, and release them all into the water along with some red flowers, incliuding the last snake - the adder that killed him. I went to read through the book at the library to find out if this ceremony actually took place, and found that it did. It happens in the movie more or less exactly as she describes it in the book and in photographs, including a picture of the last puff adder in the stream with a red flower. Everything we see involving snakes in the movie seems fairly realistic and accurate - even the snakes lying around on the ground ready to be caught - it happens that way sometimes. The movie was filmed in Kenya and South Africa so it appears they used African snakes. The pythons are probably African Rock Pythons. The Puff Adder appeas to be just that. I'm going to make a guess that the spitting cobras are Mozambique spitting cobras and the snakes that Emanuele calls green snakes are Spotted bush snakes. I have no idea what the gray snakes are, maybe some kind of house snake or grass snake.