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Snakes in Movies   Octopussy (1983)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   Roger Moore is James Bond in this farce which has 007 dressed up a circus clown in order to stop a plot by a renegade Russian general to set off a nuclear bomb at an American air force base in Germany. The circus is run by a beautiful woman nicknamed Octopussy who lives on an island in the middle of a lake in India in a palace populated only by women. The women are a cult of female bandits and smugglers that use a deadly venomous octopus as their symbol. They also work like slaves for Octopussy, rowing her ship and performing in her circus. This is one of the sillier Bond movies, but it does have plenty of action and the Indian locations look great, especially Udaipur, the city on a lake where much of the movie was filmed. (When I was there 26 years after the movie was released restaurants still offered free screenings of the movie every night.) There are also two snake scenes that use real live snakes and both scenes are unusual in that they use the snakes primarily for comedy instead of danger. (There are also three crocodile scenes.) The first snake scene happens when Bond goes to India. We see him get off a boat and walk up some stairs in the background as we see and hear a snake charmer playing a flute for a cobra rasised up out of a basket in front of him in the foreground. As Bond gets closer, the snake charmer starts playing the James Bond movie theme on his flute. Bond stops, because oddly he recognizes the theme! Maybe he's a fan franchise. (I don't think I've ever seen anything this meta in a Bond film, but it's a great gag, and the only diegetic use of the theme in a 007 movie so far.) Bond tells the snake charmer "That's a charming tune" and then they exchange some secret passwords and introduce themselves. The snake charmer is Bond's spy contact Vijay who pretended to be a snake charmer as his cover, but he tells Bond it was the wrong cover because he's afraid of snakes. So afraid, that he quickly dumps his basket in front of another snake charmer, which allows the cobra to escape. The second snake scene comes during a tiger hunt. Bond is imprisoned at the palace in India of a villain named Kamal Khan. Khan has climbed up on an elephant, preparing to go on a tiger hunt, when he spots Bond escaping into the forest. He directs the men to hunt for Bond instead of the tiger. As Bond is running through the woods he stumbles into a web full of giant spiders and then a tiger. Bond points to the big cat and tells it to sit, and it actually does. Housecats won't even do that. Then Bond lies down on his belly to hide in a bush as the hunters surround him, not knowing where he is hiding. We see Bond make a worried face and turn to look at his backside, then we see a large snake crawling over his back and legs. He tells the snake to "Hiss off!" and it crawls over him and back into the bush. Bond then creates a distraction with one of the elephants and escapes. He swings on tree vines and yodels like Tarzan until he lands in some shallow water and gets covered with leeches. He continues running through the wetland as a crocodile chases him. Finally he escapes the hunters and the crocodile by wading out to a tourist boat.