Starring Zheng Long, Peng Bo, Shi Xuanru, Pang Yong and Cao Tiankai. Written by Xie Wenjun, directed by Guo Yulong and Xie Wenjun. Produced by Li Shi.
A ginormous snake escapes from a snake farm (that’d been using illegal growth hormones in its feed to breed larger reptiles for its snakeskin handbag business) and slinks down to the nearby Haixi Flight Attendant Aviation College, where it runs amok, accompanied by masses of regular-sized, aggressive serpents. A valiant security guard (Long) and a feisty student (Bo) team-up to help a group of survivors holed up in the college buildings live through the ordeal.
This film should technically have been called ‘Rising Boas in a Flight Attendant Aviation College’, but I guess that title was far less punchy! Setting this film in this location does provide the filmmakers with an excuse to show droves of screaming female students, wearing figure-hugging white skirts and light blue blouses, clattering around in their high heels, as the huge snake rampages about the college, in scenes that really ramp up the movie’s cheesy fun factor.
Some girls and their teachers get gobbled up, then the story transitions into the siege-focused part of the plot. Despite a title that Freud would have salivated over, the film steers away from showing anything too lascivious, contenting itself with an occasional shot of, say, a small snake slithering from a dead student’s skirt or the scene where a snake crawls over an underdressed character whilst she’s in the middle of indulging in some blindfolded foreplay with her boyfriend. But none of this is as exploitative as the sweaty promotional art, which seems to promise something more risqué. There’s nothing here that reaches the delirious, manic, mondo heights of 80s Hong Kong schlock-fest CALAMITY OF SNAKES, for instance.
A sequence with the guard hero hanging from cables strung between two buildings, with the mega-snake curled up below him and two smaller snakes making their way along the cables, is well-handled, with special effects that are on a par with the kind of FX seen in similar flicks.
By the midpoint the film tries to become a little more serious, as more people get picked off and squabbles break out amongst the survivors. There’s a pause in the action to allow an elitist, selfish student to be lectured about the importance of working people, in a speech bound to please the Chinese Communist Party censors, and then the fun stuff kicks back into gear as the huge snake launches another attack.
The guard protagonist has a moment of self-doubt (heroes in these movies often do), but he’s soon taking part in an enjoyable finale that sees the survivors tooling themselves up with homemade fireworks-bazookas. This extended showdown, ending with the recently-eaten security guard somehow surviving and crawling back out of the dead snake’s mouth, helps make this movie mindlessly marvellous in its own trashy, limited way, but it would’ve been far better if it had retained the silly, kitsch vibe of the first act.
One last look at the mega-snake…
Monster Zone 