Click on a picture to enlarge it Snakes in Movies Group Pages All Movie Snakes Must Die! All Movie Snakes Want to Kill You! Dancing With Snakes Giant Monster Snakes Pet Snakes Shooting Snakes Snake Bites Snake Charmers Snake Face Snake Fights Snake People Snake Pits SnakeSexploitation Snakes & Skulls Snakes Run Amok Snakes Used as Weapons Snakes Used for Comedy Snakes Used for Food or Medicine Snakes Used Realistically Throwing and Whipping Snakes Kinds of Snakes Rattlesnakes Cobras Black Mambas Boas, Pythons, and Anacondas Unusual Species Settings Snake in the House! Snakes in Beds Snakes in Jungles and Swamps Snakes In Trees Genres & Locations Snakes In Westerns Snakes in Asian Movies Herps in Australian Movies Herps in James Bond Movies Herps in Silent Movies Herps in Spielberg Movies

Snakes in Movies   Meltdown (High Risk) (Shu dan long wei) (1995)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a Hong Kong action/comedy starring Jet Li with lots of kung-fu, gun-fu, comedy, and bags full of snakes. It's a parody of Die Hard and of Jackie Chan's movies among other things, but it's still full of a lot of stupid action cliches that I don't think are meant to be funny - "do I cut the red wire or the blue one to defuse the bomb?" The snake scene is so unexpected that it makes me wonder if it was also a parody of a scene from another movie that I haven't seen. Basically, Jet Li plays the bodyguard and stunt double for a Hong Kong action superstar (a parody of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee.) They become accidentally involved in a jewel robbery in a skyscraper when a large gang of vicious terrorists break into a gala party and take everybody hostage while they try to hack into the cases full of precious jewels. One of the hostages is a female TV news reporter. At one point she escapes from the group of captives and hides in a rest room, but one of the terrorists finds her there and starts pulling snakes from a bag and throwing them at her. (The terrorists must have brought along bags full of deadly snakes along with lots of automatic weapons and bombs and even a flame thrower, so they would be prepared for anything. ! ) He throws snakes at the reporter as she stands on a toilet and threatens her to give him the videotape she made that shows the leader of the gang. Then, as most stupid henchmen in stupid action movies do, he says he'll be back in 5 minutes and leaves her alone to think about his demands. That's enough time for her friends to break through the ceiling and pull her up to safety. When she passes out later, they discover that she was bitten by a snake on her thigh. Jet Li cuts the wound and sucks out the poison then takes her to a medical room where he finds some "antidote" which he injects into her arm. She is all better in a few seconds. I enjoy the absurdity of snake bites and snake bite cures in movies. What takes a week or two to cure in a hospital, with extreme swelling and tissue damage and requiring multiple injections of anti-venin, is over in a flash in a movie. Either that or people drop dead instantly. Best of all, at the very end, the live but wounded terrorist leader taunts Jet Li on the telephone, telling him he escaped and is looking forward to more robberies, rapes, and pillaging in the future and there's nothing Li can do to stop him. But Li tells him that the knife he stabbed the terrorist with with was coated in snake venom. That shut him up and he keels over and drops dead. It's best not to think about where and how Li got the venom or any other such details in this and most other mindless action movies. You don't watch them for their logic, only for their fight scenes and explosions, and occasional deadly snakes, and this one has plenty. I don't know much about Chinese snakes so I don't know what kind they are here, but it looks like there are several different species in the masses of snakes we see the floor. I think most of them are some sort of rat snakes. Some of the snakes that are thrown and dumped onto the floor seem to be live ones, but those thrown directly at the woman appear to be fakes.