Leofwine_draca SNAKE PEOPLE is one of the infamous 'Mexican quartet' of films that Boris Karloff shot on the cheap shortly before his death in 1969. This one was filmed in 1968 but didn't actually get released until 1971, making it his penultimate screen appearance. I've seen three of the four of these films now and they're all similar in that they're extremely low budget horrors, made with a little imagination and lots of choppy editing that sometimes makes it feel like you're watching two films joined together, like those Godfrey Ho ninja flicks of the 1980s. SNAKE PEOPLE is one of the most disappointing of the four, because it has a lot of scope and a lot of potential. As usual, directorial chores are shared between exploitation king Jack Hill and Juan Ibanez. Individually, scenes are well shot, atmospheric, and contain a great visual style, but this is a film that's less than the sum of its parts. The editing is poor beyond belief, the script is flat and lifeless and too many ideas have been crammed in here with none of them coming to full fruition.The movie kicks off on a surreal high as a bespectacled dwarf, nicknamed Baron Samedi, sets about digging up the body of a recently deceased woman. There's a kind of madness hanging in the background, a sense of voodoo lurking unseen nearby and this is the film's best asset: a creepy atmosphere throughout. After this we're thrown into a plot involving a bullish police 'capitan' attempting to teach the pesky natives a thing or two, while the island's soldiers are dispatched with machetes and garrotes and Boris Karloff wanders around in his study, talking about telekinesis. Occasionally we go back to the evil dwarf and meet some zombies who are a cross between the willing slaves of 1940s zombie flicks and the flesh eaters of Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The film ends with a fully fledged voodoo ceremony but the climax is mishandled, just like the rest of the flick.The cast isn't really worth mentioning, other than Karloff who puts in his usual good performance – this actor never shows anything less than complete integrity. Too much time is spent with ageing real-life dancer Tongolele, who adds nothing to the plot other than a poor makeup job, and then there's the padding: endless scenes of dancing, of native mumbo-jumbo, sexist comments, repetition in the extreme, and then a ten minute dream sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie! This bit involves attractive starlet Julissa finding herself trapped in a cave with her ghostly doppelganger. Like the rest of the film, it looks cool although makes little sense. Add into the mix some poor special effects, hints at necrophilia and lesbianism, and you have a could-have-been movie that's an ultimate disappointment. I rated this on par with DANCE OF DEATH, with ALIEN TERROR being the best of the four so far.

Uriah43 When "Captain Labesch" (Rafael Bertrand) arrives on a remote island under French colonial rule he is determined to put an end to the barbaric practices involved in voodoo rituals. With him is a naive young woman named "Anabella Vandenberg" (Julissa) who wants to rid the world of alcohol. To aid her in this mission she has come to the island to enlist the help of her rich uncle "Carl van Molder" (Boris Karloff) who owns a large plantation further inland. But what neither Captain Labesch nor Anabella realize is just how powerful the people who practice voodoo really are and that they are quite willing to use whatever means are at their disposal to continue their blood-thirsty rites. Anyway, rather than detailing the entire story and possibly spoiling the movie for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this turned out to be a bit better than I expected. Admittedly, the action was a bit bland but the overall story was decent enough and the dancing of Yolanda Montes (as the voodoo priestess "Kalea") certainly didn't hurt the film in any way. Now, that is not to say that this movie is great by any means. But I didn't think it was that bad either. That said, I give it an average rating.

aaronmocksing1987 I liked Boris Karloff in the Mummy, and Frankenstien, but like all actors reaching their peak they decide to take whatever they can give them... and this was one in which Boris took. Whether it was for money, boredom, you be the judge, but he did the movie and now I will probably be the judge of how it looks.Visual and colorful, that's about all I liked. And the nice dancing.But the acting is as poor as any B-movie fan or non-fan can pretty much see. Stale, plain, and unintentionally funny comedy arises from a movie that would have been better off shelved forever. There are moments that are pretty gruesome, but the midget... yes, him, is actually cute as he outshines Boris more than ever. I remembered him over Boris Karloff, and wondered why he doesn't appears for more than a few scenes. Why doesn't he? Oh well.

Jonny_Numb Snakes. A midget with a flower painted on his bald head. An aging Boris Karloff in full-on "Colonel Sanders" mode. An inane plot (that's neither funny nor so-bad-it's-funny) intercut with backlot, Roger Corman-style voodoo ceremony scenes. Bad dubbing trying to pull all the disparate elements together.This South-of-the-Border horror quickie (scripted by Jack Hill, of "Spider Baby" fame) is one of two films that spliced in separately-shot footage of Karloff near the end of his life to make the lousy thing marketable. "The Snake People" is just a dull, charmlessly inept piece of junk--director Juan Ibanez makes Ed Wood look like Scorsese.