HORROR / THRILLER |
ALPHABET | SEQUELS | SCARY TOP 10 | SCIENCE MOMENT | UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHÉ ALERT | VARMINTS |
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Filler. Think of it as an ecological niche. The proliferation of channels, especially movie channels, created the need for cheap movies to be on at 3 AM. Supply met demand and the result is a species of film somewhere below B. Im telling you this so youll understand why anyone would look at a truly awful film like PYTHON and actually want to sink money into a sequel. Neither of these films will ever be mentioned in the same breath as the words box office. But in their own little late-night cable niche, they do what theyre supposed to do: kill time until enough people are watching to make it worthwhile to play the better movies. PYTHON II was directed by L.A. McConnell (aka Lee A. McConnell, Lee Alan McConnell and Chance Marquez), his first time in the feature film directors chair. The screenplay came from Jeff Rank (DEEP SHOCK). If you didnt see PYTHON and are worried about being able to follow the storyline well, dont worry. Youre fine, especially since this movie contains a great many flashbacks to the first movie. Filler within filler. This time the story takes place in Chechnya, the breakaway Muslim republic within Russia. Another giant, acid spitting snake is on the lose and an American Colonel (Marcus Aurelius: BLADE, TOTAL REALITY, BOA) is put in charge of Russian soldiers whove been paid by the American government to capture the monster alive. Colonel Jefferson explains this in exhaustive exposition, beginning with his speech to the soldiers with, For those of you who dont know where we are So much for what little suspension of disbelief I had left. The captured
snake is loaded on a cargo plane (like in the last
movie) which promptly crashes (like in the
last movie). This time the plane is brought down by a Chechen stinger
missile rather than a storm. A Russian army unit (apparently
not in communication with the Russian army unit that helped capture the
snake) shows up at the crash site and machine guns all the Chechens,
including a defenseless woman who wasnt there a second ago but shows
up just in time to be shot. This is so the Russians can be portrayed as
bad guys for killing Chechen terrorists who moments before were laughing
about the cargo The snakes (turns out theres two) are still in their cargo containers, which are hauled back to the Russian base and, of course, opened. We cut to a young couple apparently running a trucking company here in central Asia. The American husband, Dwight (Dana Ashbrook: RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD II, WAXWORK, TWIN PEAKS [TV], BOA) and his Russian wife, Nadia (Simmone Mackinnon: THE LOST WORLD [TV], DEEP SHOCK) run afoul of a local crime lord but are rescued by American agent Greg Larson (William Zabka: DARK DESCENT, PYTHON). Larson was the small town cop in PYTHON but now he has a career as an intelligence agent. He offers the couple $100,000 to use their truck to drive into Russia and pick something up. For that amount of money (especially in that part of the world) he could have bought a fleet of trucks and had Tajikistan carpeted. No wonder our taxes are so high. The rest of the movie of course takes place in the industrial hallways of the underground (why?) Russian base. Thats just standard operating procedure for movies like this because its cheap and because its vaguely reminiscent of their ultimate source material: ALIEN. Which ultimately reminds me of a !!!SCIENCE
MOMENT!!!: Endless bad acting and a truly unbelievable (compared to what?) shift of a major character from good to evil make this movie almost unbearably bad. I give it two negative shriek girls.
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