Starring Kam Kwok-Leung, Li Lin-Lin, Chen Chun, Lin Feng and Ko Ti-Hua, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung for Shaw Brothers.

Zhihong is a poor, gawky, bullied youth living in a shack next to a snake bladder store in a rundown Hong Kong neighbourhood. When an injured cobra slithers through a crack in the store wall, entering Zhihong’s ramshackle home, he decides to stitch up the serpent’s wound and look after it, triggering a set of circumstances that will lead to Zhihong using his killer cobra, plus more reptiles liberated from the store, to avenge himself against those who have treated him badly.

Unlike Willard (1971), however, which this film is obviously inspired by, Zhihong is a far more disturbed protagonist compared to the rat-obsessed main character in the American original. In a scene where Zhihong carries a prostitute who’d tried to mug him back to his shack, The Killer Snakes queasily merges Zhihong’s desire to get back at his tormentors with his disturbed sexual urges, showing him take advantage of the woman by tying her up and licking her. Though Zhihong himself has been a victim of bullying, he does far worse, allowing his snake friends to violate his captive in a sweaty, seedy scene that uses black and white flashbacks to suggest Zhihong’s dark urges stem from childhood memories of abuse and voyeurism.    

Starting with mondo-style footage of live snakes having their gall bladders cut out, this film is sordid and repellant in many ways, but it is well shot and lit, juggling its exploitative components expertly. Bondage fantasies, scenes of Zhihong letting monitor lizards scratch his latest tied-up female victim, a set piece involving an abusive character chopping up snakes for real with a sword before he’s constricted to death by a huge python, plus other grindhouse elements, show how this movie set its sights on offending and disturbing its viewers, a goal it obviously succeeded in achieving with sleazy ease.