Showing posts with label giant snakes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label giant snakes. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

One Was Enough

 

 (imdb)

PIRANHACONDA-2012-2 gigantic snake things terrorize a Hawaiian island where a low budget horror film is being made. Some gang also holds some of the cast & crew hostage. Everybody runs around, surviving or getting eaten. Michael Madsen is a snake hunter who has an egg. The special effects are terrible. It premiered on The Syfi channel.

Director Jim Wynorski did a re-make of THE GIANT GILA MONSTER after this mess.

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Friday, November 27, 2020

They Don't Call Him Mr. Big For Nothing!


 THE CYCLOPS-1957-Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott) is looking for her husband who disappeared in a mysterious valley in Mexico. Along for the ride are the pilot Lee Brand (Tom Drake), bacteriologist Ross Bradford (James Craig) and Marty (Lon Chaney), a grumpy guy looking for uranium. They encounter some giant animals (lizard, hawk, rodent) and the husband now a 25 foot giant (Duncan “Dean” Parkin) with a radiation scarred face and one eye. He traps them in a cave and kills Marty. They make for their airplane while the cyclops is fighting a snake. Bradford throws a flaming spear into its eye and they escape. 

Once again writer-director Bert I. Gordon makes a low budget movie about a gigantic man. Supposedly shot in 5 or 6 days Gordon did his best with what he had. Monster Dean Parkin played the scarred Glen Manning in THE WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST the next year, a sequel to THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (which Mr. B.I.G.made the same year as this; he also made the giant bug movie THE BEGINNING OF THE END in '57). 

Star Gloria Talbot was the lead in DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL the same year as this. Male lead James Craig was once groomed to be Clark Gable's replacement while the star was in the army. 

Despite having co-starred with Judy Garland in 1944's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, Tom Drake's film career never took off and he wound up mostly doing TV. 

Lon Chaney co-starred in the TV series "The Last of The Mohicans" around this time. He had a standout role in THE DEFIANT ONES the next year. 



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Sunday, May 31, 2020

Ho Time!


THUNDER OF GIGANTIC SERPENT-1988-Soloman, some over acting nut schemes to control the world’s food supply. Meanwhile a little girl Ting Ting plays with her pet snake Mozlar.  In a lab a doctor and his staff do an experiment on a frog that makes it grow larger. Solomon's men attack the lab and kill everyone except one scientist Lin who gets away with the formula. Her car crashes but she jumps out before. Later Ting Ting finds the container with the chemical that made the frog grow. She brings it home and puts her snake in it. It grows to an abnormally large size but obeys the child. They play catch and hide and seek but Solomon's thugs see them and figure the snake might have some connection to the formula (brilliant deduction!).

Meantime in another movie government agent Ted Fast (Pierre Henry) walks around, has gun battles and martial arts fights. A police inspector (Lee Hsiu Hsien aka Danny Lee from THE UNTOLD STORY) tries to protect Lin who was actually a spy for Solomon. His thugs kidnap Ting Ting and Mozlar comes to her rescue. They set a trap which is supposed to electrocute the snake but instead the electricity makes the snake grow much larger! When the thugs kidnap the girl again, Mozlar follows wrecking a train and killing the passengers. The snake kills many innocent people and wrecks lots of buildings. Occasionally scenes of Ted Kung-Fu fighting and talking on the phone are shown.The ending is so drawn out. And what should have been a poignant finale where the little girl cries for her pet gone wrong is ruined by her incessant whining. It all finally ends with Ted killing Solomon in a fight. 


This was originally made in Hong Kong in 1980 but wasn't released until many years later. By then infamous splicer/hack Geoffrey Ho got a hold of it and added the scenes with Henry to make it a confused mess.

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