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Atlantis' Hewlett in "Boa vs Python" on SciFi Channel tonight

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    Atlantis' Hewlett in "Boa vs Python" on SciFi Channel tonight

    TV Guide Online has a review of the made for tv movie, "Boa vs Python" which stars "Stargate Atlantis'" David Hewlett. The movie airs on the SciFi Channel (US) tonight at 9pm. The movie is repeated at 1am, and again on May 27th at 8pm and June 27th at 7pm.

    http://www.tvguide.com/tv/review/

    Snake Charmer
    Boa vs. Python
    (9 pm/ET, SCIFI)

    Any movie that pits the surviving members of Monty Python against a boa constrictor is certainly worth checking out. Unfortunately, Boa vs. Python isn't that movie, although it holds its own with John Cleese's Fierce Creatures.

    Actually, this 2004 made-for-cable epic is another of Sci-Fi Channel's Saturday-night cheese chillers. These are grade-C movies that positively bristle with phony monsters, gratuitous gore, goofy plotting and ironing-board-stiff performances. This genre has been a staple of drive-ins — and later, direct-to-video retailers — since that Citizen Kane of lizard movies, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, first stomped across movie screens in 1954. Watching the Big Green Guy in action last night, I marveled at the gusto of that unsung actor in the scaly rubber suit who obliterated an entire HO-scale reproduction of Tokyo as Raymond Burr perspired. Whoever that thespian was, he was a real artist. It was like watching the Phillie Phanatic wade through a village of Fisher-Price people in a bipolar rage.

    Now, anyone can dismiss this style of moviemaking as cheap, inane and obnoxious, but it takes a certain mindset to appreciate these films as the guerilla art they truly are. Compared to a bozo production like Boa vs. Python, the self-consciously avant-garde opuses that pack 'em in annually at Sundance just seem, well, garde.

    There are few places more outlandish than Atlantic City. There are even fewer places more outlandish than a reproduction of Atlantic City in Bulgaria, where this was filmed. Organizing a private hunt for his friends, Broddick (Adam Kendrick) — a stogie-chomping tycoon with a chiseled Chippendale's physique — acquires an 80-foot python as the prey. The prey quickly kills the thankless Joes sent to release it into the wild by flattening them with its enormous tail. From "Atlantic City," the beast slithers its way to a water plant near "Philadelphia" for more munchies as FBI agent Alan Sharpe (Kirk B.R. Woller) gives chase.

    When the python proves too elusive and powerful for conventional law enforcement, the Feds team a buxom herpetologist (Jamie Bergman) with a genetics genius (David Hewlett) to breed a massive boa constrictor capable of slugging it out with the slippery menace. Meanwhile, the tycoon and his moll (Angel Boris) stalk the python with a pack of NRA poster boys. There is something cool about the sight of a pistol-packing Boris slinking through a sweaty forest in a camouflage tank top, beneath which a foot-long serpent tattoo is stenciled along her curvaceous spine. You won't see that sort of thing at Sundance — Angelina Jolie shows up.

    The sight of Bergman and Boris interacting with Kendrick's Boddick and colossal snakes adds an odd phallic symbolism that becomes more pronounced as the film plods on (especially when a woman is gobbled up in her boyfriend's backseat). Even weirder, the snakes' faces communicate an innocence more appropriate to the Muppets than to rampaging reptiles — at least until they strike. Cynics would just call that bad filmmaking. I call it making room for Dada. So nerts to you, Robert Redford.

    Perhaps one day, when I am rich, famous and tacky, I will organize my own direct-to-video schlock-shocker film festival. I will call it the "Monster Mash and Clash Bash." Screenings will be held in Phoenixville, Pa., at the Colonial Theater, an old movie house that played a pivotal role in the career of Steve McQueen.

    Hey, if it's good enough for The Blob, it's good enough for me. — G.J. Donnelly



    |*|(*)|*|(*)|*|

    Personally, I like the tag line for this movie:

    How do you stop a 100 foot snake?

    Get a BIGGER snake!

    (Okay, then what do you do with the BIGGER snake?)

    |*|(*)|*|(*)|*|

    Morjana

    SG1-Spoilergate
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