Vipers (Genius/RHI DVD)
Picture: C Sound: C Extras: D Feature: D
When a quaint, idyllic island
community is threatened by deadly, poisonous, genetically altered snakes, the
soap opera drama of its residents is interrupted just long enough for everyone
who has been sleeping around to get killed and eaten. But this isn’t just the usual teen cautionary
tale horror flick. What we have here is
an example of a good Iraq War allegory that suffers from terrible writing,
terrible acting, and a bad case of Tara Reid. Vipers
is one of the latest in the “nature gone wrong” horror subgenre, and to be
honest for a genre that already has a bad reputation, this movie and its kind
are sinking to a new low in quality.
The quality of the widescreen
picture varies over the course of the movie. There are a few shots over the course of the
film that are clear and well executed, but the majority show the video
compression and suffer from a bit too much motion blur; likely from the bad
digital shoot. The audio, in Dolby
Digital 5.1, is decently mixed, but the dialogue has a bit of softness to it.
There are no special features.
There are parts of this film that
indicate that the filmmakers have done significant research on snakes, and then
there are parts that indicate that they have completely ignored the information
that would have helped them make a better movie. The result is a movie in which snakes feast on
the corpses of their victims like lions, and in the midst of attack their
bodies flail in the air like wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men.
-
Matthew Carrick
