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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good but it still has big flaws, August 29, 2003
This review is from: King Cobra (DVD)
Giant snake movies have been popular enough for quite a few of them to be made. This one involves a giant snake that is half king cobra and half diamondback rattler. That alone would make for a nasty critter, but there is no explanation as to why the thing is so big. There is also a gap after the snake escapes (before the credits) and the main bulk of the movie. We get a screen with the words "2 Years Later". What has the giant snake been doing in all that time? There was a touch of Jaws added in that the snake comes to a small town that is just about to be in the middle of a festival that spells financial freedom for much of the town (a local brewery is going to go national). Our cast of characters includes the Mayor (Hoyt Axton is great as usual), his daughter who is a police officer, and her boyfriend who is the town doctor but is moving to the big city. Add the scientist whose lab the snake escape from (actually a good guy) and a herpetologist (Pat Morita) and you have pretty much the whole thing. While this snake is huge, it is not bulletproof like Python. It is a normal genetically-spliced specimen. Ordinary tactics will work against it. The film does a pretty good job of adding some tension and scenes that make you jump or flinch (something lacking from most of the snake movies). All in all a pretty good effort.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Possible To Like For Different Reasons, June 22, 2001
By A Customer
I am surprised to find that anyone thought this was a scary, well-acted, "carefully crafted" movie - their standards must be rather low. However giving King Cobra a low rating and being critical of its low-budget special effects, implausible action scenes and tired dialogue misses the fun: it's so bad it's good. Seeing Pat Morita seriously try to wrangle a giant snake, going mano a mano ("hand-to-hand") with the cobra spitting venom in his face, while Pat tries to subdue it using a pole is so lame one can only smile incredulously. Upon witnessing Pat saving the cobra's life from a shotgun blast only to then complain, "We've got to get that damn cobra before it gets one of us!" I could only shake my head. When no one bothers to watch where the giant snake slithers off to because they're too busy talking to each other about "the plan" I grinned at the director's failure to even try for believability. It helped that I found this movie in the bargain bin and that I drink alot.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pat Morita, Erik Estrada, Hoyt Axton And A Giant Snake Named Seth, May 16, 2008
This review is from: King Cobra (DVD)
In "King Cobra" Scott and David Hillenbrand bring us another giant snake epic. I have seen any number of this genre of films and this is actually one of the more entertaining of the bunch. The film borrows conceptually from the great "animals gone wild" films that came before it, most notably "Jaws", but does so in an entertaining manner that lets the film be derivative yet simultaneously amusing.
The film opens in a secret lab where there is a mutiny by several underlings who don't understand the scientific method at all well. The net result is the release of Seth, a giant half-cobra, half-rattlesnake mutant which was bio-engineered for maximum aggression.
Two years later a small town is preparing to host a lager festival, which is wholeheartedly endorsed by Erik Estrada in a hilarious and very flamboyant cameo completely unlike his typecast roles. After a few deaths the mayor is asked to call off the festival, but of course that's out of the question. An expert herpetologist is called. Who could it be? None other than Pat Morita, who comes up with a plan involving a vibrating machine, a large metal tube, and a goat to capture the snake. To say that the plan encounters difficulties is something of an understatement. (As an aside, is kung fu really a recommended method of self defense against a thirty foot long snake?) The plot is resolved and the cast is thinned out in a manner you may be completely expecting, but the scenes of the love-struck protagonists rolling a giant tube containing a huge snake around in the forest is a special treat.
The DVD has several extras including a decent commentary from the Hillenbrand brothers, a trailer for the film, and a making of feature that is brief but interesting. For all the cheesiness to be had here the actual models and special effects are notably better than many CGI snakes that have starred in other (even worse) giant snake films.
If you like implausible B-movies featuring giant creatures eating helpless small town citizens, this is a predictable, inane, yet fairly entertaining herpetological voyage.
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