Touches You

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Better Late Then Never

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Hired for his transportation services, a former mercenary and his wife accompanying a secret convoy to a Soviet military base find it overrun by a gigantic snake and must battle the creature to get out alive.This here turned out rather decently overall, though it's better than might be expected. The location being kept in the darkened military base underground with its tight, cramped quarters and endless corridors always it to have a bit of a creepier feel than expected, especially when it winds itself up and really lets loose in the second half. That it focuses on the more traditional forms of suspense with its wailing cry off in the distance and being hidden away in the location makes these scenes far better than expected, and generally makes it quite exciting at times. While it does provide a nice body count within, the fact that the CGI for the snake is so ludicrous that it rarely looks realistic enough and really takes that away from the film. Also quite flawed is the fact that it doesn't really have a sequel feel to it, with little to connect it to the first one other than one character, and that's not saying much else for it. It's also got a tendency to fall into cliché far too often and feel reminiscent of too many other films when it could've done something unique with the material. That quality with the CGI, though, is the film's real true falling grace and what holds it down.Rated R: Violence and Language.

Forget King Kong. Forget Godzilla. Python 2 (or, as it is even more awesomely named in the UK 'SNAKES') is truly the defining monster movie of our times, perhaps any times.So awesome is this tale of man and reptile, in fact, that the distributors see fit to charge no more than £1 for it in bargain basement DVD buckets. So epic is it, that the producers avoided putting any of their or their actors' or directors' names on the back of the DVD cover. That there are no special features at all should be of no importance.Why, if you squint you eyes and smear your screen with Vaseline you can almost dare to say the CGI Snake looks real. The actors' performances are so virtuoso they barely move at all on screen. One woman was even included in the cast! The plot tells a weeping tale of tragedy and the folly of over-ambition, as the government (or, some guys with guns at least) try to recapture a big freaking' snake in a military base somewhere in Russia. Surely some social commentary on our times, friends.This movie will change your life. I haven't even finished watching it yet and I am moved to review it on IMDb.

There's a certain paint-by-numbers formula that these creature movies follow: the creature is always created by the military, which never makes any sense but we can live with it if the movie's good. The movie always seems to end up in a dark basement full of pipes. The good guys shoot the creature numerous times, but considering it's obviously added via CGI in post-production, shooting it never seems to have any effect. And then there's the half day of work they pay the pyrotechnics crew for, which is the last scene where the monster is destroyed. This movie follows the same formula, but overlays it with the Sci-Fi channel formula of having the characters behave obnoxiously and fight amongst themselves for reasons of, well, apparently they saw people doing that in a real movie once.In this flick, a giant snake is loose in a really small Russian military base. A team of commandos goes in to get it, but they need a truck to haul it back with. Yeah, you know, all that training, all those weapons, all that organization, and a 100 thousand dollars to throw around, but no truck. So they do something that this audience member really regrets: they hire an American truck driver to accompany them. So they get to the base and find that the 85 foot, 12 ton snake has escaped its refrigerator sized box, and since it's now obvious that they won't simply be hauling it back on a truck, they tell the truck driver to go away. Oh, if only he had. They even paid him the whole 100 grand, for doing nothing, and yet he still sticks around. What follows is the snake attacking these folks numerous times, and the truck driver whining and complaining about being put in danger. Didn't they give him 100 thousand and tell him to go away? He even punches the guy for getting him into the whole mess, but wait... he tried NOT to get him into this mess. Then he demands to know "the whole story". Oh please, please go away!That's what really ruins this thing, the typical Sci-Fi Channel obnoxious lead character. Leave him out and it would have been quite watchable.

"Python 2" is rather underrated in my opinion. Granted, the sets can be seen in many other low-budget science fiction channel projects like "Dragonfighter" and "epoch", the characters were stereotypical and the plot was absurd (How the heck are they going to train a seventy-five foot snake to do things for the military?), but the actors were competent, the special effects are surprisingly good for a television film (SpoilersAcid-spittings, soldiers getting bitten two, people being swallowed whole, a impressive-looking CG snake), it was generally inoffensive and quite watchable, I must say I enjoyed it. People keep bashing it, but remember..it's a TV film, not a big-budget hollywood blockbuster. Just ignore the few irritating flaws in the plot and I think you'll enjoy it, too.