King Cobra (1999)

reviewed by
Frankie Paiva


King Cobra (PG-13) **
Starring Pat Morita, Scott Hillenbrand
Directed by David & Scott Hillenbrand
A Review by Frankie Paiva

I have a weakness. There is something about watching (and renting) a movie that you know is going to be bad to begin with and then watching it for the pure pleasure of laughing at the bad acting, the poorly written script, and the inane plot sequences. King Cobra is a straight to video release that markets itself as "Thirty feet of pure terror!" with a mutated snake mix of Eastern Diamondback and a cobra. King Cobra is everything that it promises to be: bad, stupid, silly, cliched, etc., etc., etc. To help you through this review, I will be listing the amount of cliches that we've all seen in other movies.

During a freak laboratory explosion (cliche #1) a extremely dangerous species of snake (cliche #2) escapes to a peaceful small town (cliche #3.) Breeding with one of the snakes there, (cliche #4) as it begins to reek a new kind of terror (cliche #5) and bite everyone in sight (cliche #6.) So it's up to the town's good looking doctor (cliche #7) to save everyone from the snake.

The film even features the biggest creature feature cliche of all: "Oh darling, let's make sweet, passionate love in the forest. I hear something that sounds like rattling, let's go. OK, I'm sure your right, it's nothing to worry about. Even though the last three people to hear snakes rattling died of snake venom I still want to make sweet, passionate love in the forest." (cliche #8.)

The film is full of all of these fun cliches, and it's fun to see where it turns. The film does have some suprising twists though, Pat Morita (obviously doing this film for the work) turns up late in the picture as a snake expert that has to inject hinself with snake venom monthly to make his blood an anti-venom and poor Erik Estrada makes an extremely bad and embarrassing cameo as the town's homosexual Richard Simmons type fitness guru. King Cobra also features some good special effects and some effective jump scenes that are surprising in the midst of this otherwise horrible production. So if your looking for a fun film to watch and make fun of, rent King Cobra which gets ** stars.

A Review by Frankie Paiva The 12 Year-Old Movie Reviewer E-Mail me at: SwpStke@aol.com Visit my website at: http://expage.com/page/teenagemoviecritic


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