Herpetologist Strother Martin amuses crowds with his mastery over a King Cobra in SSSSSSS.
THE GIANT LEECHES) and once double-billed with THE BOY WHO CRIED WEREWOLF. Like the concurrent NIGHT OF THE CO- BRA WOMAN, this is a human- into-snake fable, though science, not black magic, is the catalyst here. In a reverse of Dr. Moreau’s technique, herpetologist Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin, avoiding all mad scientist clichés) at- tempts to turn naïve college stu- dents into serpents because, well, we’re headed for a fuel shortage and “the world is going to be- long to the cold-blooded spe- cies.” With his latest failure sold to a carnival freak show (a real amputee in John Chambers makeup plays “The Snake Man”), Stoner hires David (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’s Dirk Benedict), a meek young man who thinks nothing of the supposed anti- venom shots and doesn’t even get all that upset as he experi- ences weird physical changes like peeling skin and chilled blood. A romantic breakthrough with the doctor’s perky daughter
Kristina (Heather Menzies) turns Freudian when David fully changes into a King Co- bra and slithers loose, only to be pounced on by a chattering mon- goose. Much screen time is de- voted to educating us about snakes, and in WILLARD-like sub-plots, Stoner uses his “obe- dient serpents” as instruments of revenge, a theme previously ex- plored in STANLEY and soon to inform Shaw Brothers’ KILLER SNAKES. The preposterous story is very close to the British-made MUTATIONS of the same year, substituting snakes for plants. Universal serves up a nicely
detailed anamorphic transfer, framed at 1.85:1, which suffers a bit from noticeable edge en- hancement. Two scenes fea- turing nudity were optically censored prior to the PG-rated film’s distribution; and this re- lease, not surprisingly, retains the obstructions. A cropped, full- frame trailer is included, prom- ising “the most unusual horror film ever made.”
TERROR TRAIN 1980, 20th
Century Fox Home
Entertainment, DD-2.0/S/MA/ 16:9/LB/ST/+, $14.98, 96m 32s, DVD-1 By Bill Cooke
This better-than-usual, Cana-
dian-made entry in the early- Eighties stalk-and-slash cycle deposits the usual gang of young idiots aboard a train, rented out for a New Year’s Eve celebration where all the passengers—in- cluding the requisite killer—are in costume. This enables the ar- chetypal masked maniac to change his guise throughout, bringing variety to the murder sequences and adding yet an- other disconcerting element to the film’s phantasmagoric con- cert of garish art direction, psy- chedelic lighting schemes and skittish camera movements. Then-reigning scream queen
Jamie Lee Curtis (HALLOWEEN, PROM NIGHT) stars as one of a tight-knit group of Fraternity brothers and Sorority sisters
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