In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez teamed up in an attempt to bring the grindhouse experience back to the big screen. Each of them crafted a film that fit into the mold, but while the experience was fantastic, it did not exactly live up to its billing. It was more of an homage than a recreation. The movies were just a little too slick, and dare I say, good. They got the aesthetic down, with the built-in scratches and marks that made the prints seem old and word out.
You may be wondering what this has to do with the movie at hand. Well, this is a real grindhouse film. At least, this is what I assume such a film would be like. When you add in the English dub track on the DVD — you may just as well be in a darkened theater with sticky floors, crappy projection, seats with springs sticking out, and that odor that you can't quite put your finger on.
The legendary Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong birthed The Killer Snakes. They are mostly known for their fantastic collection of martial arts films, including Five Fingers of Death, the film that helped launch the kung fu craze of the seventies while playing the grindhouse circuit. Despite their martial arts notoriety, they were also involved in dramas, musicals, and even the exploitation genre. It is the exploitation genre within which The Killer Snakes lands, and exactly what makes this a grindhouse film.
The DVD case attempts to play up the controversial and titillating nature of the film with the label: "WARNING: Contains extremely sick and disturbing scenes. Not suitable for most people." The big question is whether or not it lives up to that billing. It is too bad that the answer is not quite so simple.
The film tells the story of Chen Chih-hung (Kam Kwok-leung). He is a poor delivery boy who has dealt with a life of being picked on and beaten up, not to mention the sexual perversions of his father that he had the unfortunate experience of witnessing. All of these factors have led to him being an introverted and sexually frustrated young man. He lives in a dirty shack next to a barber. By day he delivers food and dodges beatings from the local thugs; by night he fantasizes to magazine pictures depicting bondage and other fetishistic images. This is his life, as sad as it is, until the fateful night that an injured cobra slithers into his home. He takes care of the snake, nursing it back to health, and realizes that he has a special relationship with the scaly reptile, and the other snakes that accompany the cobra, whom he has named Xienbao.
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