Jaws of Satan

Aside from being Christina Applegate's debut, there is really nothing notable about this failed attempt at combining religious hokum with animal life on the attack. Fritz Weaver guts it out and turns in a decent performance as a small town priest whose ancestors are responsible for a curse being brought upon his parish. It seems that hundreds of years prior, his ancestor stamped out a druid cult and now their spirit is reborn in the form of a king cobra! And this king cobra happens to have jumped off a circus train after killing the crew just as it passes through this small Alabama town!!! YES You heard that right!! Now, the cobra casts its spell on other snakes in the area and causes them to randomly attack anyone they encounter! All this while a new dog racing track is about to open. And the mayor and the guy building it of course won't let anything delay the grand opening! No matter how many people get bitten! It's up to the priest to re-discover his faith and drive out the evil snakes!!! As you can tell from the above paragraph, this film is laughable. At least Snakes On a Plane apparently knew not to take itself seriously. (I've never seen that one, but that's what I understand) But Jaws of Satan plays it straight and only generates unintentional laughs! So many goofs! Plexiglass between the snakes and cast members is clearly visible in some scenes. In one scene, the sheriff is called to stalk a dangerous snake in a hardware store. The snake is clearly just a harmless gopher snake, but they try to make it seem like its attacking him!! We hear a gunshot, even when he clearly did not fire the pistol. Then, the snake just kind of slumps onto the floor... clearly not dead or harmed! The music is absolutely wretched, the film is filled with padding like people driving or taxiing down a runway in a little plane. Thought I was watching R.O.T.O.R. for a moment with all that padding! Lots of ancient clichés abound. We get a morgue attendant who leaves food lying around dead bodies and acts casual while eating next to corpses. Seen that one in so many others.... We see an expert brought in from out of town, but he doesn't amount to anything. Just serves as a love interest for a female town doctor. I don't know where to stop with my criticism, so I'll just do it here. Awful film! 2 of 10 stars.

The Hound.

Jaws of Death (1981)

1/2 (out of 4)

It's common knowledge that THE EXORCIST and JAWS made a lot of money at the box office. It's common knowledge that both films had countless, needless rips that would follow throughout the decade. What isn't common knowledge is why it took so long for someone to try and take both films and mix them into one. The film starts off on a train as a large snake breaks free and lands in a small Alabama town where it starts to kill people. We then flash forward to a Priest (Fritz Weaver) whose father happened to have been fighting Druids or something and it turns out that Satan himself has taken over the body of this snake. This true excitement leads to a dingy cave where the Priest must perform an exorcism on the snake. I'm fairly convinced that Satan's an evil guy but if The Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil thought me anything, it would be that evil Satan would be ashamed to be associated with this film. There are bad movies then there are movies like this that make no sense at all and will leave you scratching your head every few minutes. It should be noted that Dean Cundy (HALLOWEEN, THE FOG) did the cinematography here and Christina Applegate made her screen debut. With that out of the way, this movie gets off to an incredibly bad start. We're on the train when a number of stupid events take place and not a single one of them makes any sense. The second man the snake goes after has a shot of the snake where we can easily see the glass between it and the man. What's worse is that this piece of glass is not only seen but it's extremely dirty from previous takes The story itself is all over the place as it's never quite clear what's going on as we got Satan taking the body of a snake but then we have the Druid plot thrown in for whatever reason. As in JAWS, we have the evil mayor who wants to keep the story on the quiet side so that a dog track can come to town. The performances are all bland to poor but we don't necessarily come to a movie like this for the performances. For the most part the snake attack scenes are rather tame but there are a few quick shots of blood. We get one stupid scene after another but in the end there's no doubt that this here is one of the worst rips of either JAWS or THE EXORCIST.

This flick here still unavailable on DVD as I am writing this was made in the heydays of horror. But what this film does is showing us how not to make a horror.

It's hard to believe with a cast like this that this is really a turkey. A snake is supposed to be Satan and terrorises a town. Looks promising but it's so low on everything and really has cheesy effects that I would classify it under a big failure. Bob Claver, the director in fact never made another movie, he was more into series. But the direction I could dig but the storyline and effects were laughable.

In the beginning when the snake attacks on a train you could easily spot the glass partition between the snake and the victim, and it gets funnier when you see the snake hitting the glass. Further on you only see the bitemarks of the snake on swollen faces.

The acting was okay, face it, big names from the genre were in it, Fritz Weaver and Gretchen Corbett of many famous horror flicks. But why most people are hunting the US VHS down is for the performance of the 10 year old Christina Applegate, here in her first role ever. And you will recognize her immediately due her eyes.

Jaws Of Satan is only worth watching for Christina fans or for the lovers of bad horror flicks. maybe some will want to see Gretchen walking around in her nudies but it's clean edited with nothing to see. It doesn't deliver scariness or blood, it's a lot of blah blah and you really must see the cheesy ending.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

A king cobra being transported by train to a carnival supposedly becomes the resting place for Satan himself. And in this form, Satan has the ability to command other slithering reptiles to do his bidding. This company of snakes arrives in a small town to disrupt the lives of the locals, among them irreverent priest Father Tom Farrow (Fritz Weaver, "Creepshow"), dedicated doctor Maggie Sheridan (Gretchen Corbett, "Let's Scare Jessica to Death", 'The Rockford Files'), and herpetologist Paul Hendricks (Jon Korkes, "Syngenor").

"Jaws of Satan" certainly wears its influences right on its sleeve, including the naming of the Hendricks character. It plays like a cross between "Jaws" and "The Exorcist", except without the level of craftsmanship in those two classics. It's directed in very workmanlike fashion by TV veteran Bob Claver, in what appears to be his only feature film. The shocks aren't anything special, nor are the suspense scenes, but at least the animal action is well executed. If this low budget production at least *looks* very good, that's due to the contributions of the great cinematographer Dean Cundey and camera operator Raymond Stella, two guys who did some of their best work for the director John Carpenter. The music score by Roger Kellaway ("Evilspeak", "Silent Scream") is quite good, and the movie does have an atmospheric opening. The similarity to "Jaws" itself is quite obvious in the way that the mayor (Jack Gordon) and businessman Matt Perry (Bob Hannah) don't want public fears about snakes to interfere with the operation of their brand spanking new dog racing track.

Some of the supporting cast is rather nondescript, but things are held together by a highly engaging Weaver. Diana Douglas, whose son Joel was the production manager, co-stars as the doom sayer Evelyn Downs. A very young Christina Applegate makes her film debut here, playing the daughter of her real-life mom Nancy Priddy's character.

This viewer found "Jaws of Satan" agreeable enough. It's not a great movie, or even a good one, really, but it's passable schlock for lovers of Animal Attack cinema.

Five out of 10.

Imitating the success of a certain horror classic is quite easy. Everybody did it back in the early 80's. All you had to do was steal the basic concept of a great film and/or box office hit, add more nastiness and preferably some sleazy sequences as well, and you had yourself an insignificant but enjoyable horror movie. Ain't nothing to it. One thing that does require a lot of courage (and tasteless insanity, for that matter), however, is to simultaneously rip off TWO legendary horror classics even though their plots have absolutely nothing in common! The title of this shameless piece of 80's cheese reveals it all: we are dealing here with a cash-in of both "Jaws" AND "The Exorcist". How can you possibly blend the concept of animals on the rampage with satanic possession, I hear you ask? Well, you can't… Surely the first draft of the screenplay made this clear as well, but they went along and made the movie anyways. In a godforsaken rural town in Alabama, Satan suddenly and for no apparent reasons possesses a rattlesnake. Or maybe He simply just appears in the form of a virulent snake? Actually, that would explain why it suddenly turns into a King Cobra. I don't know, either that part of the script didn't get explained properly or I wasn't paying enough close attention. Numerous dead bodies, mutilated with giant gaping holes in their faces, have to pop before the local priest decides to come into action. He's a direct descendant of a family of Druids, so if anyone can exorcise this slithery venomous demons, it's him. In good old Jaws tradition the town's prominent council members also refuse to admit there's a problem, since they just opened a fancy dog-racing track and hope to lure many tourists with this attraction. "Jaws of Satan" is a delightfully inept and imbecilic low-budget horror flick, typical for the early 80's, with clumsy effects and laughable "stunts". This is the type of movie that wants us to believe one of the characters comes into face to face contact with a deadly snake, even though you can clearly spot the dirty Plexiglas that separates them. Another character, the female lead heroine, spends an incredibly long time on the bed with a snake whilst nothing happens. She calls her boyfriend for help, and even though he's in his motel room a couple of streets away and still needs to get dressed first, the snake patiently awaits his arrival before launching attack. There are a bunch of underdeveloped sub plots that lead nowhere, like a rapist biker chasing the heroine or a spiritual medium lady that can't even predict her own death. On a slightly more positive note, the snake-bitten faces of the victims are quite cool (although it's the exact same make-up repeated 6 times) and the rural Alabama filming locations are very enchanting. And yes, that cherubic little blond girl is indeed the future Kelly Bundy in her very first appearance.