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Snakes in Movies
 
Voyager (Homo Faber) (1991)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
Voyager Voyager Voyager
Voyager Voyager Voyager
Voyager Voyager Voyager
I was enjoying this movie, the story was engaging, the scenery and settings were beautiful, and so was Julie Delpy, but then she gets bitten by a snake. When they want to get rid of a character it's often either a snake bite or the character is suddenly run over by a truck. Either way, it's such a cliche that I lost interest. The movie is based on the famous German novel Homo Faber which also kills the character off with a snake bite. So much for great literature.

Sam Shepard plays Walter Faber in 1957, a successful engineer who believes in logic and technology. He is intentionally disconnected from a normal life by his constant traveling. He's the titular Voyager. But he suddenly gets caught up in a series of highly-unlikely coincidences that confuse his sense of rational order. He impulsively jumps on an ocean liner sailing to Paris, not because he just survived a crash-landing in the Mexican desert, but because he wants to get away from his girlfriend who won't break up with him. On the ship he meets Sabeth (Julie Delpy.) When they get to Paris she and Faber travel through France and Italy in a rented car and begin a love affair even though she is young enough to be his daughter. Funny story - it turns out she is his daughter. I warned you about spoilers. He finds out her mother's former name and realizes the mother is his former girlfriend from Germany 20 years earlier. Then he does the age math and realizes that if her mother didn't get the abortion she told him she was going to get, then Sabeth could be his daughter. He is understandably freaked out about this and he insists on taking her back to her mother, Hannah, who lives in Athens, to find out who is her father.

Just before they get to Athens, Sabeth is sleeping under a tree and he is wading in the ocean when a snake crawls up onto her chest and bites her. We don't see the bite, only her reaction to it which causes her to trip and fall and crack her head on a rock. Walter re-unites with her mother at the hospital (and eventually learns the terrible truth about Sabeth's paternity.) Hannah tells him the doctor said the snake was most likely a snub-nosed viper, and that her survival chances are good because mortality from venomous snake bite is 3 - 10 percent. Finally, some realistic snake bite statistics with a believable outcome. But Sabeth dies anyway, not from the snake bite, but from a fractured skull.

There actually is a Snub-nosed Viper - Vipera latastei (aka Lataste's viper or snub-nosed adder) but it is not found in Greece, only in Spain and northern Africa. The only venomous snake in Greece is the Nose-horned Viper (aka horned viper, long-nosed viper, sand viper) - Vipera ammodytes. Maybe the Swiss author of the novel got them confused. Whatever the case, the snake we see in the movie is a harmless snake, probably a Four-lined snake, which is found in Greece.