Scriptorius This movie has been re-titled "Sea Snakes." Maybe it had a name change to dodge a bad reputation. Anyways, it's a movie about snakes on a submarine. " Aha," you say. "The crew will simply isolate compartments, wear breathing equipment, and turn the compartment oxygen off." Well, we all know that would make for a 15 minute movie ... So pretend that it's not a real submarine, a real submarine crew, or real snakes. Oh yeah, the scientists aren't real either. I guess this is my beef with this flick, no suspension of disbelief. Most of the stuff looks fake, and it's hard to care or get engaged. There's a lot of technical errors and they are annoying. One teeny example: in one scene the ship's corpsman (the medic) puts some anti-venom next to a bunch of glass containers, all sitting on top of a cabinet. That's OK if the cabinet is affixed to a building in a non-seismic zone. All those glass jars would have fallen off the cabinet and shattered once the sub went to sea. If you want to see bigger technical errors or learn lessons in careless movie making, watch the flick. Just don't expect to be entertained.

zardoz-13 "Silent Venom" is--no surprises here--essentially snakes-on-a-sub. The U.S. Navy has sold an old submarine to Taiwan and Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom Berenger of "Sniper") assigns Lieutenant Commander James O'Neill (Luke Perry of "The Fifth Element") to skipper the sub. It seems that O'Neill disobeyed a direct order and he stands to lose his retirement benefits as well as his rank, but Wallace engineers a deal that will save the Lieutenant Commander both his rank and honor. Naturally, our hero does not care to sail as a skipper on an unarmed sub. Meanwhile, on an island, Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista Allen of Emmanuelle, Queen of the Galaxy") and her unethical research assistant Jake Goldin (Louis Mandylor of "Renegade Force") have been conducting research on venomous snakes so that they can provide the Pentagon with anti-toxins for troops in chemical warfare situations. The Red Chinese decide to stage maneuvers and the Pentagon needs somebody to pick up Swanson. You guessed it. The old sub is the closest thing to transport so Admiral Wallace orders our hero to let them hitch a ride. The catch is that Dr. Swanson can neither divulge the nature of their research nor that they are bringing snakes aboard a submarine. Furthermore, Swanson has only a few bottles of anti-toxin that has never been tested so she does not know if it works. No sooner have Swanson and Jack settled into the sub than the snakes get loose. A curious sailor is the culprit."Silent Venom" is reminiscent of a 1974 made-for-television David Janssen thriller "Fer-de-Lance." The bigger snakes are clearly computer-generated-imagery while the smaller snakes appear to be real snakes. Veteran exploitation filmmaker Fred Olen Ray of "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers," knows his craft well enough to milk a modicum of suspense out of the formulaic screenplay by Mark Sanderson. Indeed, Ray has called the shots on over an hundred of these direct-to-video movies. The best scenes show both the real-life actors handling the snakes. Luke Perry has to remove several snakes from the neck of Krista Allen. "Silent Venom" qualifies as strictly an exercise in boilerplate suspense. The ending is clever.Tom Berenger doesn't have a big role, but everybody does fine.

Mo ([email protected]) Okay, so maybe the plot was silly, but watching it at 2:00 AM on a real fuzzy screen made it believable. I watched this for Luke Perry, I enjoy his acting and here was no different. Krista Allen is a cute and fun and... well, okay I'll come out and say it, I enjoyed this movie. I guess since I only watch a movie every month or so, I don't experience much. Only thing I would have liked to see was when Luke Perry's character was about to board the plane it would have been funny if they told him the in-flight movie was Snakes on a Plane. Regardless, fun movie, don't take it too seriously and you may just find yourself caught up in it.

terrible2 "Snakes on a Sub" (or "Recoil" or "Silent Venom") was on my list of films to see, simply because I had to know why some (once mighty) actors would want to appear in a Fred Olen Ray (or whatever name he's going by this week) movie... The answer is (obviously) money.The film wastes no time in letting the audience in on what to expect. Really (and I mean really, painfully) bad CGI snakes, that the average 12 year old kid could do a better job with on his home PC. It makes you wonder if they even tried? Yes, they look like cartoons of the worse kind. That being said, the story is not all that bad... Once the premise switches over to the what (and why) a submarine is involved, it actually pulls you in, and you begin to forget about the stupid snake storyline. There is an underlying war-themed adventure about an out of commission sub (and crew) that accidentally wanders into enemy waters. Very well acted by both Berenger and Perry, this part of the film really worked for me, and I became engrossed in the story. The dialog appears to follow proper Navel protocol, and you begin to feel for the characters. Unfortunately, we are soon reminded that this is "Snakes on a Sub" and the B-Movie resurfaces. I think it could have made a decent war drama on it's own, however not many people would likely rent (buy) it for that."Horror Sells!!!"Thus, we are left with good acting and really, painfully, horribly, cheesy FX and an hour and a half of our lives gone forever...Enter at own risk.