***Snakes on an Island*** A group of tourists, resort workers & guides in South Africa struggle to survive after getting stranded on an island with a profusion of deadly snakes. William Katt (Malcolm), Wayne Crawford (Jake) and Kate Connor (Heather) emerge as the main protagonists. Crawford also directed and co-wrote the script. “Snake Island” (2002) is a low-budget South African production with a few American actors; it probably cost half of what the typical SyFy flick costs. But it gives you what you pay for (although I hope you watched it for free): a plethora of snakes, authentic African locations, a mildly entertaining survival situation with an okay cast, a subdued sense of humor and some decent horror. It helps that most of the snakes appear to be real rather than CGI. But it’s overall pedestrian, unfortunately. I guess it doesn’t help that I don’t find snakes particularly frightening. Director/writer Crawford tried to perk things up with a tiki party sequence wherein the group lets their hair down and some of the females start dancing topless. But the women, while okay, aren’t anything overly alluring, although Kate Connor eventually won me over. The film runs 1 hour, 30 minutes and was shot in South Africa. GRADE: C/C-

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Well, it has Wayne Crawford and he is always remarkably watchable, being one of those actors that never really made it big, has a body of work that is mostly low budget fair, but still seems to entertain even in the worst of films. However, it takes place in Africa and that is curious because there is a real Snake Island off the coast of Brazil and it's little details like that which really annoy me when I sit down to watch a movie. Was Brazil not an exotic enough location to add the realism of setting it in Ilha da Queimada Grande? Or was it that pit vipers simply didn't have the star power behind them so they chose to relocate the entire thing across the Atlantic? Despite that, it's not Anaconda, they use real snakes and that is a plus to me. Something ridiculously huge is more comical than anything, but the real snake plays to my near pathological ophidiophobia fairly well...making the movie, at least for me and the chaotic camera work certainly adds to the energetic feel I experience when encountering a snake in real life. So, to say the least, I found it extremely unsettling to watch, despite people yelling "Is it poisonous" when it is clearly a cobra.

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