I think it’s also safe to say after watching this movie that the Humane Society doesn’t have too high a profile in Hong Kong. Animal abuse in this movie runs rampant and there’s several scenes that could easily compete with any number of Italian jungle cannibal movies for sheer gross out value.

You’ll also be grossed out by the sweaty psycho at the epicenter of this swirling mass of grubby horror due to his being drenched in his own perspiration constantly while wearing a tight, yucky pink shirt. And his skin condition. And his predilection for having flashbacks involving peeking his mom and her lover!

So yes, the movie does a more than adequate job of giving us a character who we easily believe could snap one day, befriend a bunch of snakes, and use them to carry out his revenge schemes. The only problem is that this guy is so nasty and creepy that you can’t wait for his snake friends to wake up and realize that they’re just being used and turn on him!

Zhihong lives in a shack next to the neighborhood snake shop. I must not live in a big enough city because we don’t have a snake shop, but this snake shop looks to be the equivalent of a General Nutrition Center where they make your supplements fresh, right there while you wait.

Instead of paying some outrageous price for dubious male enhancement products with equally dubious names like Horny Goat Weed, customers at General Reptile Center are paying to eat snake gall bladders. I imagine that snakes everywhere in the Orient breathed a bit easier when Pfizer came to their rescue with Viagra!

Even though Zhihong is the scariest loser imaginable, there’s a hot mama who is hanging around making eyes at him. Her name is Xiujuan and she runs some sort of booth near Zhihong’s house. Zhihong has a crush on her, but instead of ambling next door, asking to borrow a cup of snake gall bladders, and gathering up his courage and asking her out, he sits at home staring at his bondage magazines and playing with himself!

After losing his job due to some bullying hookers and johns as well as being stood up by Xiujuan for a date, Zhihong is surprised to see he has a visitor from the snake shop. It’s a snake that’s had its gall bladder removed, but it is still alive and Zhihong takes a liking to it and sews its wound right up, naming him Xiaobiao in the process.

Once you’ve starting having conversations with escaped reptiles and lose interest in you porn mags, it’s a sure sign that you’ve completely gone over the edge!

It isn’t long before Zhihong gets into another confrontation with the gang of hookers and johns. This time though you’ve got Zhihong screaming “bite her dead!” at Xiaobiao and you get your first snake attack.

These snake attacks are never really that impressive since it either requires a guy out of camera range to thrust a snake at someone or for the same guy to just heave snakes at people, giving us that whole “flying snake” phenomena you only see in movies about killer snakes.

Even though Zhihong’s life is finally looking up (having an army of murderous snakes that kill hookers is an improvement for this guy), his ex-crush, Xiujuan, is forced to make some difficult decisions.

After the death of her father, her friend urges her to become a hooker to start paying the bills. Xiujuan reluctantly agrees since it’s just common sense to sell your body when you’re confronted by a family crisis and she starts hanging out with a scuzzy guy that her friend sets her up with.

The various rapes and murders that follow culminate when the snakes attack a guy armed with samurai sword. This results in slow motion shots of live snakes being chopped in half. You even get to see their parts writhing on the ground!

Whether that’s the most offensive scene in a movie rife with such moments is debatable since you’ve still got the part left where Zhihong decides that he needs to get rid of Xiaobiao and his fellow snakes before the police close in.

So we get to see Zhihong set all these snakes on fire. And they really get burned up. Xiaobiao somehow survives the fire and takes his revenge on Zhihong, finally putting this whole sordid mess out of its misery.

This movie has something to repulse everyone! Women, animal lovers, people adverse to perspiration. It’s all there. No skanky stone is left unturned!

It’s not only an ugly movie, it’s an ugly looking movie. Maybe the shaky zooming shots work fine in kung fu flicks where guys in stringy white beards wearing their pajamas are taunting one another about their fighting skills, but in a movie like this, it doesn’t come across as a stylistic choice so much as a guy being unable to operate the camera properly.

Ultimately, Killer Snakes is just a run of the mill “loser gets revenge with the help of some creepy animals” story you’ve seen before but soaked in a gross combination of off-putting hump scenes and gag-inducing scenes of animal violence. (Just for the record, the off-putting hump scenes were also gag-inducing.)

© 2010 MonsterHunter

In spite of the monks’ non-interventionist policy, the people do what they can to rebel. Since they don’t know any kung fu magic though, they get caught by the bad guys constantly and this results in beat downs, the destruction of businesses, and good old fashioned executions.

Any concerns though that this movie is going to get bogged down by lots of plotting, politics, and riding to and from secret camps is immediately put to rest when in the first five minutes of the movie, a rebel takes on a bad guy at a public execution in the greatest screen depiction of a fight between a guy with two swords and a guy with a battle axe ever!

This is a culture that respects a kick ass brawl, so even the bad guy wants a fair fight, one on one. And then once he slices up one of the rebel’s arms, the bad guy announces that he will beat him one handed!

San Te is a young man who knows right from wrong and he knows that the bad guys are really, really wrong! After getting mixed up with the rebellion, he ends up on the run, determined to make it to the Shaolin temple so that he can learn kung fu and return to help his people.

Despite opposition from some of the monks, he is allowed to stay and after a year of sweeping the floor he complains that he wants to learn kung fu, but all he’s gotten to do so far is KP duty. He is told that all he had to do is to ask and which chamber does he want to start out at?

San Te says the top chamber is the place for him! Do I even have to tell you that after a visit to the top chamber, he revises his goals and says that maybe the bottom chamber has its advantages, too?

What follows is the single best and lengthiest training montage in all of film! We follow San Te for the next five years as he moves from chamber to chamber mastering all sorts of skills and super powers.

If you thought being a Shaolin master killer was just about throwing kicks and punches in your pajamas, then you obviously need to go back to the first chamber straight away. You must know balance and speed and be able to run across logs floating on water.

You must develop your arm strength by carrying water buckets while knives are strapped to your biceps so that if you lower your arms, you’ll slice yourself. You must master all the various weapons of a Shaolin monk including swords and pole fighting.

Your eyes must be as quick as your body. And your head must be as hard as your oiled up chest. San Te battles his way through all these trials until he is given the option of which chamber he would like to teach at.

The end of his training is but the beginning of a new phase of San Te’s life. What is the 36th Chamber of the title? Has San Te forgotten those he left behind in his old life? Is it possible to break the centuries-old code prohibiting monks from teaching laymen and concerning themselves with laymen’s affairs?

Will we see San Te put all the skills he’s learned to use against the Tartars? What do you think? San Te invented an entirely new weapon while at the temple. Do you think he’s not going to be trying that out on some barbarian’s skull?

This one delivers fantastically staged action and battles involving multitudes of skilled fighters without a lot of cheesy slow motion or computer enhanced trickery or guys flying around unnaturally on wires like with some of these fake kung fu gods.

The remaking of San Te from young villager to accomplished monk is the centerpiece of the film and the sheer variety and inventiveness of tasks make watching the transformation a pleasure.

Like Five Deadly Venoms, this is an excellent place to start your kung fu education. This one was followed by two sequels, The Return To The 36th Chamber and Disciples Of The 36th Chamber which is good because it’ll mean I won’t wear out this DVD as soon as I otherwise would have.

© 2010 MonsterHunter