Oh my God, this is an Eastern exploitation treasure that is, without a doubt, the greatest killer snake film ever! After a nest of slithering nightmares (what else can you call them?) are found on a construction site, the developer uses earth moving equipment to squash them dead. Fortunately for us, the viewers, there are lots more snakes where this lot came from, so once construction gets seriously underway on the site, the serpentine scaremongers get their revenge in the bloodiest, nastiest way. But unlike recent snake entries such as "Snakes on a Plane" and "Anaconda", the snakes used in this movie are real, and there are thousands of them, literally! This also means that when the humans start fighting back against the snakes, real snakes get butchered, burned, sliced open, eaten and chopped in gruesome, graphic close-ups. As a confirmed animal lover, I found these sequences fascinating but very hard to stomach. I felt sorry for the great snake actors who had no idea of the fates awaiting them at the end of the movie. This insane, furious, savage flick is part Mondo, part Horror film. There is even an extended sequence in which half a dozen mongooses battle it out with dozens of angry, p*ssed-off snakes in an enclosure. It was like watching a lost scene from "Shocking Asia". The drama between the snake action is a little slow, so it's a fast-forward job on second and subsequent viewings. You will marvel at a snake master fighting a giant snake kung fu-style and you will recognize the music scores stolen from "Maniac" (Jay Chataway) and "Dawn of the Dead" (Goblin). I like the Chinese "Killer Snakes" and I've even liked American snake flicks such as "Stanley" and "Sssssss", but "Calamity of Snakes" truly takes the snake cake as far as snake flicks go.
Review of Calamity of Snakes
