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   Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)   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 very strange western Samurai movie with Japanese cowboys, made by the offbeat Japanese director Takashe Miike. It deals with a nameless gunfighter in the mid nineteenth century who travels to a Nevada gold rush town that has been taken over by rival gangs searching for treasure. It's based on the 1961 Japanese film "Yojimbo" and the 1964 Spaghetti Western film "A Fistfull of Dollars," which notoriously lost a lawsuit proving that it plagiarized "Yojimbo." It also has elements of the 1964 Spaghetti Western film "Django," and at the end becomes an origin story for the character Django. Before the main plot starts, there is a short introductory sequence that features a snake. The first thing we see in the movie is an eagle flying overhead. Then we see a dead man lying on the ground with a bullet hole between his eyes. We see a black snake crawling on the ground between some eggs near a henhouse as a chicken clucks and walks around in the background. As the snake crawls, the eagle flies down and grabs it with its talons and flies away with the snake next to a man wearing a poncho who is crouched over on the ground with his back to the bird. (He's Piringo, played by Quentin Tarantino.) Without even looking at the bird flying behind him, Piringo quickly rolls over onto his back and shoots up at the bird. Feathers float down on him and then the snake drops into his hand. He pulls out a knife and cuts a red egg out of the snake's belly, then throws the dead snake away. As he holds up the egg, a man emerges pointing a gun at him, followed by two other men. Bells ring in the distance and the gang's leader asks what they are. Piringo tells a story of two clans, the Heike and Genji, who split into the Reds and the Whites and waged war on each other. This will be the plot of the movie to come. They are the two gangs in control of the mostly-abandoned town. Then Piringo wipes some red off the egg to show its white shell and continues into a monologue with a ridiculous accent. (All of the dialogue in the movie is in English and is spoken with very strange sometimes tortured accents making it often impossible to understand. The Japanese actors have an excuse, being made to speak a language they are not familiar with, but why Tarantino was directed to sound as awful as them is a mystery.) Piringo tosses the egg to one of the men, who throws it into the air. Piringo pulls out a gun and shoots all three of the men, then finishes off the gang's leader, and after an absurd amount of time for the egg to be in the air, he holsters his gun, holds out his gun hand, and the egg falls right into it. Then he immediately pulls out a small bowl, cracks the egg, and whips it up with some chopsticks as a woman appears saying that's why she loves him. Cut to Piringo eating some hot Sukiyaki and dipping some meat in the bowl with the raw egg. (I Googled it - a beaten raw egg is sometimes used as a Sukiyaki meat dipping sauce. The egg slightly cooks as the hot meat is taken out of the pan.) The woman and Piringo are seen together again much later, when he beats her because the Sukiyaki she made is too sweet. Nice guy. The movie was filmed in Japan, so I suspect they used a Japanese Rat Snake, which would be appropriate since it's a snake that actually swallows whole eggs. However, it's not a snake that would be found in Nevada where the movie is set. Watch the intro/snake scene on YouTube, if it's still there.