Ogosmith
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin
The movie really just wants to entertain people.
Payno
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Phillemos
This is a pretty bad killer-snake movie. Mad scientist fooling around accidentally creates killer snake. It's a fairly slow-paced movie, but there is an interesting cast with Pat Morita and an amusing cameo from Erik Estrada playing a gay festival organizer. There are also some lines that are derivative of "Jaws," (i.e., "We're going to neeed bigger guns") and the movie is on the whole quite similar to "Jaws," except of course with a killer snake. The special effects are ordinary, and even though it's a horror movie the directors seem to take extreme steps to avoid showing violence. There is only one good reason to watch this movie, and that is the beautiful Kasey Fallo, who plays the deputy sheriff. She does a good job, and as in her other movie "Pinata: Survival Island" she is scrappy and finds a way to survive in the end. Basically, two scenes stand out in my mind. 1) When Kasey Fallo tries to get the Scott Brandon love-interest guy to stay in their small town (prior to Seth the Snake's rampage), he goes on a tirade about how he hates the town and wants to be a big-shot city doctor. And he does so with all the passion of a guy who's reading a telepromptor. 2) Pat Morita starts questioning the scientist about why we wanted to cross-breed two deadly snakes, and the two look as if they're about to get into a throw-down brawl. Then Pat puts on his "Karate Kid" hat and spends the next five minutes talking about "respecting" the snake. I would give this movie a 3, because it's pretty bad, but the lovely Kasey's appearance motivates me to move it up to a 4.
leeaf83
I saw this movie after reading plenty of the negative reviews on IMDb so I had low expectations.The good; -this film had the scariest and most realistic snake of any snake movie I've seen including the Anaconda and Python movies. I've seen people slam it because the snake didn't look real enough but even the shark in Jaws looked rather fake (not claiming this is equal to Jaws or even in the same class but people need to cut films some slack and realize that not everything is 100% factual). -a fairly good musical score -scares: a few scenes where the snake pops out of nowhere to attack really sends chills up your spine -Pat Moriata: I have never seen the Karate Kid so I have no bias but he definitely played a cool characterthe bad: -several Jaws rip off scenes; the scare at the beginning (though to be fair all giant predator movies seem to have attacks at the start) except done inferiorly due to breaking the rule of showing the creature on the first attack. The blatant ripoff line "we're going to need bigger guns" and the plot line of a money hungry mayor not wanting to close down an event to protect the civilians from the monster and eventual hiring of an expert of the monster in question -some of the death scenes were long and drawn out and predictable. The director did a good job with a false scare early in the movie with using the attacker as the camera peering up to a little girl only to realize that it was her brother sneaking up on her with a rubber snake (though this may be a copy of the Jaws scene with the pranksters swimming with a a shark fin on to scare the people on the beach), we then get a long drawn out stalking of the King Cobra on the little boy. It would have worked much better to have the snake pop out of nowhere. -we end with an unresolved cliffhanger; Seth is still alive but likely no sequelFinal grade: 7 out of 10
Coventry
To start off with a little bit of good news... "King Cobra" is definitely better than all its fellow, recent creature-features handling about ridiculously big snakes, like "Python", "New Alcatraz" (a.k.a "Boa") and even the box-office hit "Anaconda". The special effects and the animatronic snake look really good here and the Hillenbrand brothers have at least have some directing skills. Still, all this can't hide the fact that "King Cobra" is an overall lame flick and, moreover, as unoriginal as humanly possible. As usual, the story opens with obnoxious scientists performing experiments – for no particular reason – with the world's most dangerous species of snakes. The laboratory goes boom and a humongous cobra escapes towards a little redneck-town where it starts to have the locals for lunch. Remarkble, however, is that this seems to take place only two years after the lab-explosion. Supposedly the 40 foot long snake just hijacked around unnoticed for that whole period... Many people turn up dead and their corpses filled with venom in the beer town of Fillmore but, in the good tradition of Spielberg's "Jaws", the local authorities initially refuse to accept the problem, as this would result in an economic disaster.Granted, some sequences surely have tension and an effective build-up, but there never are real surprises or shocking moments. The Hillenbrand brothers also sometimes attempt to bring more depth into their script but this never properly leads anywhere. There's the bizarre sequence, for example, where professional the snake-hunter (Pat Morita) prevents someone else from killing the snake when he has the chance. Does he insist on killing it himself? Does he wish to keep it alive? Does it have to be killed using a special method? I do admit the dumb bunch of hunters made me chuckle and I stupidly loved the unsubtle Jaws-reference ("We're gonna need bigger guns..."). "King Cobra" is a generally incoherent film with more plot-holes than a teabag and unfortunately only a couple of good moments. Creature-Features are a terrific sub-genre in horror, but giant-snake films rarely ever work...except for the 1982 "Venom", maybe...
Bogmeister
30 feet of pure terror! So proclaims the jacket ad. The monster snake is actually a Cobra-Rattlesnake creation, the result of genetic tinkering. After the obligatory lab explosion, it escapes and settles down in a small rural town to make life hectic for the hicks, who call in snake-expert Pat Morita (from Happy Days and the "Karate Kid" movies). This flic is rather low-budget and must have went direct-to-video. I'm not really sure how much of it is unintentionally funny or tongue-in-cheek (especially the climactic battle between Morita & the Monster, who, by the way, is named Seth). But, it comes off as entertaining in a goofy, lopsided manner, hearkening back to all those monster flics of the 1950s (and the 1970s, come to think of it). There weren't that many giant snake movies back then, however, instead mostly giant insects and an occasional lizard. Then we got "Anaconda" in '97 and the rest is history - the Sci-Fi Channel has a sub genre load of these by now. The snake-monster itself in "King Cobra" is fairly well executed, showing that even with a very low budget, FX can be done in a reasonable fashion these days. Lucky us.
