Curse II: The Bite

UK title - The Bite. A young couple driving across the American Southwest are warned by a gasoline attendant not to take a short cut through a former military testing ground. Naturally they ignore hit advice and the guy ends up getting bitten by a snake. Over the course of the movie he slowly mutates into a gross half man half snake creature. The acting is pretty good and there are some interesting characters but at the end of the day The Bite is all about special effects. Screaming Mad George provided them here, and does a great job. However, most of these come near the end of the film, it is a bit of a slow burn until then. I watched this on VHS, it is a classic example of great sleeve artwork, which entices the viewing to watch the movie, but ultimately the end result is not quite so great. Does have a sufficient amount of Bite though to make it worthwhile.

After a young man is bitten on the hand by a radioactive snake, his hand changes into a lethal snake head, which attacks everyone he comes into contact with. Also, his body becomes filled with snakes. Now, he must prevent himself from hurting others. "Curse II" is not only poorly made, but is also boring as watching paint dry. There are some gruesome parts, and screaming mad George's special effects range from really bad to acceptable, but the script is awful, the acting is so-so, and the music is extremely annoying. Don't watch 'Curse 2: the bite". it's a typical excuse for a sequel. (By the way, what does this have to do with the original?) 2-2.5/10.

This movie gave me a nightmare that was plugged into my subconscious by the film's show-stopper climactic scene where the young "hero" at the center of the movie starts spewing live snakes out of his gullet while trying to crawl out of a drain pipe. In my nightmare I was working as some sort of a janitor in a food service establishment (scary already) and had to clean up a bathroom where a bunch of people had vomited after eating plates of teeming little snakes. It was more of a gross-out nightmare than one that was frightening so waking up and putting it behind me was easy, though it did take me a while to figure out where the idea of people vomiting snakes had come from. Then I remembered CURSE II: THE BITE, which is kind of an OK idea I guess, executed in a way that was sort of imaginative at times. It was nice seeing Jamie Farr wearing pants on my TV set for a change, lead actress Jill Schoelen was enjoyable and looked good in her underpants, Bo Svenson seemed to enjoy playing a beer swilling Southwestern sheriff walking a fine line between arrogant corruption and duty, there are some effective shock sequences (my favorite was the one where a woman doctor looses her lower jaw: OUCH THAT'S GOTTA HURT) and the film had a good sense of it's ___location in the Southwestern US and it's world of interstate highways, overpasses, cowboy bars and dusty back lots. It is a serviceable time-killer with some amusing special effects as the schnook in the lead transmogrifies into a gigantic fake looking snake, and may have been a dream come true for it's special effects technicians who looked like they got some milage out of material that otherwise would have been pretty routine. With plenty of Miller Lite, Meister Brau and 7-Up for all.

So the snake puking stuff is effective & evocative enough to trigger a nightmare, but the film did have one sequence that stopped the fun cold. I've been studying Snake Horror as a horror movie idiom for a while and one of the aspects about it is the very nature of exploitation at the heart & soul of the movies in question. Snakes do not attack, hunt or otherwise interact with people unless humans disturb them. Snakes also have an inescapable social function as sexual metaphors. There is of course the Adam & Eve connotations with the serpent as an embodiment of temptation or sin, tempting humans to revel in their natural tendency to have sex. Snakes are also the ultimate phallic symbol, being legless animals who's heads have a somewhat suggestive shape. It is difficult to use a snake in a movie -- especially a horror movie, since horror movies are sex movies in disguise -- and not deal with the sexual subtexts. This one does in a subtle but somewhat nauseating manner by suggesting that one of them crawled through Ms. Schoelen's unmentionables and deposited a glop of viscous green goop. Like, eww. She is also fresh out of the shower, still wet and wrapped in nary but a towel when the scene unfolds, reinforcing the perverse subtext of the scene with the snake a representation of the dark side of deviant human sexuality.

All well and fine, but the images that stopped the fun cold happen before that. First, during a road trip break scene the two leads pull over, the young lady retires behind a bush for a pit stop, and the schnook she is with has to use a rifle to blow away some kind of a snake that creeps up behind her. Telling the young lass to simply get up and walk away wouldn't make for a very effective horror scene and sadly it appears that the producers opted to have a technician either shoot or otherwise blow away an actual live specimen, an unfortunate but all-too common occurrence in the history of horror films. Nobody thought twice about killing a snake since they are legless squirmy inhuman creatures: Humans like things that have 2 or 4 legs and walk about while standing up. But the real problem comes in the following scene -- inexplicably described as "hilarious" by a reviewer somewhere else -- when the two leads run over what appeared to be hundreds of actual living snakes strewn about on a stretch of road.

I watched the scene in shock: Is this for real? If so it is one of the most barbaric sequences of animal cruelty yet unleashed, and following the links for producer/director Frederico Prosperi will lead one to a film called SAVAGE BEASTS, a 1978 "Nature Strikes Back" movie about zoo animals freaking out after PCP contaminates their drinking water, which used staged actual on-camera animal killings. Such behavior is beyond stupid, it is thoughtless, and a quality that many Italian made or produced films from the period have in common. Everyone knows about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and how inhuman it's animal killings are, how come nobody has protested CURSE II yet? I am more offended by how utterly stupid one would have to be to think it acceptable film-making, and the idea that people would not only be entertained by such but find it "hilarious". I have friends that keep snakes as pets & love them like they were kittens, I would not want any of them to see this movie because of that one sequence and am re-thinking my fascination with the idiom as a result of having seen it. If you have ever wondered why the movie is unavailable I would point to that as the prime reason why.

4/10: Stick to the dark sexuality next time, at least the snake might get something out of it also.

Back when I was a boy, my dad used to go to the 'video shop' to rent a film for the family to watch. My dad had a talent for choosing the worst films in the shop, but when he came home with 'The Bite' one night; I seem to remember thoroughly enjoying it. I've revisited a number of favourites from my childhood since becoming a 'serious' film fan, and have mostly been disappointed; but with this film, I agree with my childhood self that it's an enjoyable and fun little flick. I'm not sure where the 'Curse II' prefix comes from - I've not seen the original Curse, and even if this is a sequel, it still nicely stands on its own. I do, however, suspect that the prefix is a cash-in - and from now on I'll refer to this film as 'The Bite'. The plot focuses on a young couple; Clark and Lisa, who are driving across the desert for some reason. After breaking down, Clark's bad luck continues when he's bitten by a snake - and continues further when the snake turns out to be radioactive and the hand he was bitten starts to become a snake itself! On his tail are a salesman/wannabe doctor and the county sheriff.

This film has two main problems when it comes to the plot. First of all, it takes far too long to get going; I have no problem with build-up, but this film verges on being boring too often, and the build-up fails to generate any interesting characters...so it feels rather pointless. Secondly, the plot base had a lot more to offer than what we got. I guess the film took influence from Cronenberg's masterpiece 'The Fly', as it features similar themes; but the idea is never really explored, and while things such as the dog at the start get the imagination going, it's all very mundane for the most part. The acting isn't too bad, although J. Eddie Peck was miscast in the lead role. The Stepfather's Jill Schoelen is a pleasure to watch, while the likes of Jamie Farr and Bo Svenson do well in support. The gore isn't too bad either, and there are some suitably nasty scenes throughout the film. The ending is a highlight as it features the film's best stint in terms of atmosphere, and also gives a suitable climax to a macabre little tale. Overall, this is far from perfect; but despite its flaws, The Bite is still worth seeing and I recommend it to my fellow trash fans.

The movie is lousy, I won't pretend it isn't. But it will always rank in my Top 10 list of Most Erotic Movies Of All Time, because of one scene near the end of the film. Of course eroticism is subjective, but in my own humble opinion this film contains some of the most erotic footage ever committed to film. Fans of Showgirls (which I found about as erotic as corned beef) will probably not agree, but fans of Dario Argento's brand of erotic horror, or of JoBeth Williams towards the end of Poltergeist, should really check out The Bite (as it is known in England). Skip through the first hour or so if you wish - go on, I won't tell anyone - but that one scene will amply reward you.