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Snakes in Movies   Sssssss (1973)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film. "Once this motion picture sinks its fangs into you, you'll never be the same." This is a horror/science fiction film about a mad scientist who is working on a serum that can turn a person into a snake. Dr. Stoner is the herpetologist mad scientist. (Or is that redundant?) When people get in his way he likes to let his snakes fight back for him, using a Black Mamba or a big hungry African Python to do his dirty work. As you can tell from the title, this is a major snake movie, with one snake scene after another. Dr. Stoner has a pet Boa Constrictor named Harry who shares his taste for alcohol and roams around his home and laboratory. He pours booze into a dish and Harry laps it up, getting hiccups and even a hangover that requires someone to pour him an Alka Seltzer. Both Harry and Stoner are fans of poetry and the doctor likes to read "Leaves of Grass" to him. A football player bully beats up Stoner's daughter Kristina's boyfriend David, then tries to sneak into her bedroom to rape her. But she has put Harry next to the window for the night, because that's what you do with your pet snake, right? When the a-hole tries to get in through he window he finds Harry ,who wraps around his arm tighter than a linebacker's tackle, which makes him scream in fear and jump out a second story window. He wrestles with Harry and finally kills the snake with his bare hands.   The doctor is angry about his pet snake getting killed and decides to get revenge. He sneaks into the would-be rapist's bathroom and puts a deadly Black Mamba in his shower. One little mamba bite to the foot is all it takes to get rid of the bully.   A rival herpetologist, Dr. Daniels, tells Stoner that he won't get the funding he needs, so Stoner chains him up and makes him play a game. There are keys in two snake cages - one contains a harmless Western Hognose snake, and the other contains a deadly Hog-nosed pit viper. All he has to do is identify the correct species and put his hand in and get the key. I think deadly snake identification puzzles like this would make a great TV game show. Fortunately, Dr. Daniels knows his Heterodon from his Porthidium and gets the right key without suffering. Unfortunately, a giant python appears out of nowhere, crushes him to death, then eats him whole. Thanks for playing the game, doc! To help fund his diabolical schemes, Dr. Stoner gives King Cobra venom milking performances for whoever shows up, then passes the hat. There's some nice King Cobra milking, force-feeding, and man-killing. Credits at the beginning tell us that the King Cobras used were imported from Bangkok. Dr. Stoner has some crackpot theories about the coming apocalypse and how only cold-blooded reptiles will survive. He thinks that developing a serum that can turn someone into a King Cobra is the solution. One of his former subjects is now a freak in a circus sideshow. (Top left picture) Stoner gives his lab assistant David injections that he tells him are to make him immune to snake venom but are actually a serum to turn him into a snake. His efforts are eventually successful. You can tell the man/cobra was once human because it has blue eyes. (They painted the cobra's eyes blue.)    If you've ever watched a movie before, you know the doctor ain't gonna live to see a sequel. Sure enough, at the end, we see him talking to the King Cobra, who he calls "Your Highness" and "Your Majesty." (Those are also my pronouns.) He tells the snake that there is a pretender to his throne - "A king with the power of a cobra, but with the intelligence of a man." His Majesty does not take the news very well, and delivers a nasty bite to the doctor. The shocked doctor tells the snake "It's natural for you to resist change." So the snake bites him again. Even snakes don't like to be patronized. Kristina finds her father's dead body and the cobra tries to bite her, too, until the police come and shoot the cobra with a rifle. The end. Or is it? Yeah, it's the end. They never made a sequel. For some crazy reason, Dr. Stoner keeps a mongoose in a cage in his lab. After he leaves David loose in the lab, the mongoose escapes and fights cobra David. We see a real cobra fighting a real mongoose on film. We never find out who wins the fight, but it doesn't look good for the cobra, and given Kristina's horrified expression which is the last frame of the film, David didn't make it. I hope they broke up the fight on the set before one of them died, because clearly there was no Humane Society animal monitor on the set. You can watch the entire film and read a good description of it at The Silver Scream.com