In 1979, a truck carrying a crate stamped "Venomous Reptile" overturns near the little town of San Catalano, CA, releasing said reptile into the local wilderness.
Twenty years later, new Fire Chief Vic Rondelli (Harry Hamlin doing his Kurt Russell imitation) arrives just in time for a sudden rash of snakebites. The critters are huge and aggressive and everywhere, but developer Max Farrington (Jack Scalia doing his Christopher Walken imitation) doesn't want that information getting out. His housing sales are slower than expected and snakes aren't going to help him with his bottom line.
Vic conveniently has a friend, Matthew Watkins (Phillip Troy Linger trying to make the most of being second banana), who's a herpetologist and takes a captive specimen to him for study. Watkins remembers the twenty-year-old escape and speculates that the escapee, an unusually venomous specimen of tropical rattler, has interbred with the native species. There could be, he says, anywhere from 20,000 to 35,000 of the beasts.
Meanwhile, Vic is developing a yen for Mandy Stratford (Shannon Sturges), Farrington's perky blond VP for public relations and she yens back. It's anyone's guess why Farrington doesn't fire her the first time she turns up on the wrong side of the snake battle, but there's no question her loyalties aren't with the guy who pays her salary.
Eventually, the snakes' den is located and they're charbroiled in traditional Creature Feature fashion. Just how many people managed to stay awake that long is a subject for another time.
Maybe this film misses the endzone so badly because the only member of the crew with any real experience in anything close to the genre was John Carpenter. The rest -- director Noel Nosseck, story developer Patricia Arrigoni, co-scripters Matt Dorff and William Gilmore -- all have backgrounds in TV schlock and Lifetime Channel tearjerkers. It has all the elements of the Creature Features of the Fifties but none of the soul. None of the tension either, frankly, since it plays solely on humanity's allegedly innate fear of snakes for its fear factor. Personally, I like snakes and these are rather handsome specimens. There isn't even a decent level of gore -- all but one of the actual bites take place off-camera.
Sturges's character is obviously patterned after the feisty, independent women in the best of the Creature Features, from Fay Wray in King Kong to Joan Weldon in Them. Unfortunately, her vaunted intelligence and dedication to doing what's right is buried in a lot of wisecracks and babble, although she does manage to seem reasonably scared when she's trapped in her SUV and the snakes are nosing in through the shattered windshield. Hamlin spends most of the movie looking like he's planning to have a long, loud talk with his agent and Scalia never seems to know whether he's a bad guy or a good guy with bad intentions. Indeed, the one gem of a performance in the entire film is given by former child star Patty McCormack (The Bad Seed) as pet shop owner Vera Conrad. Her moments with her pet king snake, Henry, have more genuine emotion in them than either of the almost-love scenes between Hamlin and Sturges.
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