Director: Lin Yu-tang
Year: 2020
Country: China
Alternate Titles: Bianyi jiu tou she; Rise of the Mutant Cobras
Genre: Snake
Plot:
Hearing reports of a strange creature, a scientist realizes the species might be beneficial to his genetic research and leads a team into the forest to find it, but when numerous forces threaten to derail the trip must find a way to escape past the treacherous forces and the multi-headed snake there.
Review:
For the most part, this was a fairly solid and enjoyable effort. Among its better features is the workable and rather intriguing setup that allows a fine enough motivation to help everything along in this type of cheesy creature feature. The initial setup involves the group learning about the special genetic mutation that the creature possesses, which can potentially impact their studies and require the team to go out searching for it, leading to a series of workable enough setups offering a kind of starting point to deliver the twists necessary in the storyline. With the entire expedition group slowly revealed to have ulterior motives for the trip, as the different reveals bring about a couple of genuinely shocking moments where it’s hard to tell who’s on what side or what their true purpose for taking the trip is, which adds some great intrigue to things alongside the presence of the snake following them along the way.
That does leave the film with a bit of an underwhelming factor here, where it's so concerned with setting up this intriguing storyline that there’s not much in the way of cheesy snake action expected here. Detailing the backstory of the crew and their different motivations offers some fine work getting to know everybody but also keeps the snake isolated to a slew of brief ambush shots in the jungle where the scenes are immensely underwhelming. The CGI for the snake is quite weak, being great in design but feeling like another round of smoothing and artificial enhancement would’ve done the film a lot more positive points, as there’s no end to how laughably bad they look and take the viewer out of the scene when they do occur. As this does make up for the lack of action early on, with a frenzied finale offering a lot more action and encounters with the snake in action, this does have a few too many issues to counteract it.
Overview: **.5/5
An underwhelming, if still intriguing, Chinese snake movie, there’s enough to like here, while being let down by the big detrimental factors into the lower tier of these particular features. Those with an appreciation for this style or who are fans of cheesy creature features in general will be the main audience for this one, while most others out there should heed caution in favor of other entries first before taking on this one.
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