Sssssss! (1973)
Director: Bernard Kowalski
Genre: Body Horror
THE MOVIE
Can I just say that this movie has the best title of all time? I want to get that out of the way right at the beginning. I'm a sucker for onomatopoeia in horror movie titles. But there is more than just 1970's camp value in Sssssss! The first scene alone is genuinely horrifying, with two men carrying a casket-sized box up from a spooky basement and there is clearly something alive and struggling inside but you don't find out what it is until later in the movie. It's really a great and unsettling scene. Plus I think the guy who sold Richard Crenna's family the Devil Dog is the head carnie. Gross.
Much of the movie is a slow burn, as the mad herpetologist, Dr. Stoner, slowly transforms his new lab assistant, David, into a serpentine monster. Dr. Stoner is a kooky old guy who likes to get drunk with his pet snake. He and his majestically bespectacled daughter live in a an old house far outside town. Much of the house is devoted to a research lab in which Stoner keeps dozens of live snakes, frequently "milking" them for venom.
David is played by Dirk Benedict, who would later go to play Face in The A-Team and Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. His most recent work consists of making strangely hostile and sexist comments about the re-imagined Galactica series. Here, he plays one of the most effete and passive heroes I have ever seen in a horror movie (well, until A Nightmare on Elm St. 2). He eventually hooks up with Dr. Stoner's daughter and the two have a nerdy romance. Sssssss! almost feels like a prototype of David Cronenberg's The Fly but without the great tragedy of that movie.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
Sssssss! is not a particularly effects-heavy movie. Over the course of the movie we see David slowly transform into a more reptilian creature through make-up effects by John Chambers who worked on Planet of the Apes. We also get a glimpse of the fate of Dr. Stoner's first lab assistant, briefly glimpsed in the film's opening. We see the snake man in an old-fashioned carnival freak show, in one of the film's creepier moments.
What is somewhat disappointing is that the final form that David takes is not some snake/human hybrid but an actual Cobra. He literally turns into a Cobra like any one that you would see in the zoo. This is done through a pretty awful stop motion/cross fade/proto-morph effect. It kind of sucks that after sitting through the whole movie, he just turns into a big snake. In fact, some of the later phases of his transformation are much more visually interesting than his final form.
MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT
The movie's creepy opening sequence, which manages to evoke a much different kind of almost Gothic horror than the light sci-fi tone which the movie eventually settles on.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
On DVD and currently streaming on Netflix.
TRAILER
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