Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

amosduncan_2000 Stanley is enjoyable Drive In hokum, but it might have been a real classic if director Grefe had kept a little pace and not let long pauses and other nonsense pad the action. This film could lose about 25 minutes and be all the better for it. It's like they were afraid it was going to come out too short so they had everything go SLOW........ An obvious attempt to cash in on the success of "Willard" it is interesting that both central charactors start sympatheticly and turn bad. Actually, a more distinct arch in this case as Willard is kind of a creep from the get go.

lemon_magic This movie was included in a recent "Gorehouse Greats" 12 movie pack collection which I picked up for about $5. Stuff in these collections tend to be public domain movies that no one cares about keeping the rights to anymore, so I wasn't expecting "good" movies, in the sense that the movies had budgets, or name actors, or even good writing and screenplays. But you always hope to find a hidden diamond-in-the-rough, or a minor "classic" that you'd never heard of before, or something to take you back to the drive-in/grindhouse/late-night TV movies of your youth.Well, "Stanley" is about as good as this collection gets. There's a halfway decent, if somewhat derivative, film trying to get out from under the cheap film stock, the bad costumes, the crappy sets and the terrible,clichéd dialog and by-the-numbers plot. There's some very nice nature photography that someone must have spent a lot of time and effort to get right. There's a theme about ecology and respecting nature that never made it into "Willard" (either version). The lead actor has some charisma and manages to actually make some of the one-sided dialogs he has with his snake pal "Stanley" sort of work sometimes. The, er,snake wrangling was well done and the actors and reptile wranglers did a good job keeping the interactions between humans and snakes believable. The chief "villain" was kind of amusing to watch. And there were three very effective scenes - one where Tim (the "hero") throws snakes into the quicksand where a couple of the bad guys are trapped, one where the boss jumps into his pool only to realize, too late, that there are water moccasins in it, and the final shot of Tim's house burning down when his final breakdown leads to his personal Armageddon.As for the rest, well...it's strictly drive-in filler. The screenplay tries to play the "Vietnam Vet" card to give the movie some depth, but in my book, you can't just use that as an all purpose cover story. You have to provide specific examples or flesh the character out better with personal tics and stories the character can relate to the rest of the cast. Tim just kind of looks generically broody and sad.Also, Tim's main "opposition", the bad guys who work for the boss are the lamest caricatures you can imagine. They don't say or do anything that interests the viewer or surprises them - they're just there to be bitten by Stanley. Still, as I said, there's some decent stuff in here. If you can't get enough of "Willard" themed movies, here's another one for you.

PeterBradford William Grefe had a knack for turning out low budget yet effective films in the 60s and 70s. STANLEY is one of his more popular releases. The film is very dated (mainly from the guys' clothing), but worth a look. The film is at it's most creepy with scenes of real snakes crawling all over the home of the snake-man. You can imagine what it must have been like to be on the set - Grefe was probably the lone crew man. The film's weakness is in it's running time - more than an hour and forty-five minutes is much too long for this kind of drive-in/exploitation fare. The film would have been more effective if trimmed down to a 90 minute or so running time. Like one character who got bit on the ass, it hurt to sit down that long!

MartinHafer The 1971 movie, WILLARD, was a very clever film about a lonesome loser who uses his pet rats to exact revenge against the nasty folks who wronged him. Now, a year later, the film was essentially remade by schlock director William Grefe--but this time using rattlesnakes instead of killer rats. The films are very similar. Both involve an outsider who had weird and dangerous pets as well as had fathers that were destroyed by his evil business partners.While STANLEY is not a good film, you can't put all the blame on schlock film director William Grefe (just most). While he was never a particularly competent or inspired director, this sort of trashy film was in style in the 1970s and lots of directors made a ton of them because people were willing to pay to see them. However, practically none of the ones made after WILLARD had decent acting or decent story ideas. They just churned out one low-budget crap film after another, starring such things as killer frogs, piranhas, ants and even bunnies! However, most were not like STANLEY or WILLARD--where a man fell in love with the animals and controlled them. The rest were simply mindless animals running amok--and it sold.This film begins with Tim Ochopee living in the Florida swamps. He's been back from Vietnam for several months and is sick of society and its violence. Now he's like the Dr. Doolittle of snakes--living in a house filled with the critters. He earns money capturing rattlesnakes to be milked for their venom, but otherwise has no use for people. Into his ideal world comes Alex Rocco and his scum assistants--trying to get Tim to betray his beloved snakes and sell them for their hides! While this disgusted Tim, what eventually drives him over the edge is learning that Rocco's thugs had murdered his father--and Tim and his best snake friend, Stanley, are out to even some scores.Having a killer snake is pretty funny, as much of the time it does what all real snakes do--not much. At one point he tells Stanley to bite a dying man on the hand...and the snake doesn't even more a millimeter towards the guy! It's all pretty funny and at least Willard's rats were mobile! Since Stanley is pretty much a bust most of the time, Tim also uses water moccasins (though they were really just harmless water snakes) and other nasties to kill off the enemies of the reptile world. It's actually pretty funny seeing the victims of these bites die almost instantly! These must be some snakes!! After dispatching several well-deserving jerks, Tim decides to kidnap Rocco's sexy daughter. He says that he "needs an Eve in his Garden of Eden". Well, this plan works about as well as you'd expect--especially since by this point Tim and his snakes had already killed the girl's father! You'd think that even the college educated Tim would see the flaw in this logic! Later, in a tender moment when Tim is trying to woo her, he says "I want to rape you...bed you...love you". Wow. It's hard to imagine any girl resisting this come-on line...unless she isn't brain dead!! During this dopey kidnapping and subsequent love(?) scene, the most insipid and cloying music drones on and on in the background. You see no snakes in this scene, by the way, because they were all throwing up...as were many in the audience! Later after they made sweet love (i.e., he raped her), they awaken and she confronts him with the fact he's 100% insane as well as a lousy lover (insert your own snake comment here if you'd like). He doesn't take this very well and begins overacting horribly...at which point, she also begins overacting and screaming. Perhaps this is just angst in realizing how bad the movie is. When they quiet down, it's now his turn to overact as he yells at Stanley to "kill her"--and the stupid snake just lays there doing nothing. I think killer sloths or slugs would have been more animated than snakes. Finally, tired of the whole dull affair, Stanley finally turns on Tim and bites him--but you never see this! Tim yells and holds his neck--but the snake didn't move an inch!! I guess he was just too fast for the cameras to see (yeah, right).Overall, this is a bad film but probably just about as bad as any other crazed animals attacking mankind film of the era--they were mostly all very bad and silly.