Weird Wednesdays: Snakes (1974)

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

In 1974, the world was crying out… for snakes. One brave sound mixer by the name(s) of Art Names would answer that call with his sole directorial project: Snakes (aka Fangs.)

If you aren’t already familiar with the particular brand of rural lunacy that Snakes (aka Teacher’s Pet) traffics in, you’d be forgiven for lumping it in with the rest of the killer animal mini-genre boom of the mid 1970s; movies like Frogs, The Giant Spider Invasion, Night of the Lepus, Grizzly, and dozens more. But Snakes (aka Snakelust) turns out to be a much weirder animal than its contemporaries in the field. 

Kindly-but-gruff old timer Snakey Bender has just two things in his life that give him much joy: Snakes and Wednesdays. Every Wednesday for Snakey has been the same for several years: he goes into town for groceries, pays a few local children for bringing him assorted mice and birds to feed to his numerous beloved pet snakes, heads to the home of the local schoolteacher (who happens to be comically turned on by the presence of snakes), gets drunk and rowdy with his best friend Burt, and stomps around listening to John Phillip Sousa marches at maximum volume. A perfectly normal and unobjectionable routine! 

All well and good, until everyone inevitably betrays poor Snakey. The siblings who own the grocery store (one of which is played indelibly by Alice Nunn as a cigar-chomping womanizing lesbian) witness Snakey leaving the schoolteacher’s home after a Wednesday housecall of… providing her with a snake so that she can pleasure herself while it slithers all over her? It’s unclear whether the snakes actually do anything besides slither all over her, but it makes her happy, and she lets Snakey watch, so he obliges her. 

The siblings, at the behest of a diabolical preacher (who comes across as a Eugene Levy SCTV character that never was) blackmail the teacher into stopping the weekly visits. Then, the next day one of the siblings beats one of Snakey’s favorite snakes to death right in front of him, AND gives him some really spicy taffy! The preacher even dissuades the schoolchildren from hanging around Snakey.  To top it all off, Snakey’s best friend in all the world, his beloved cowboy-hatted Burt, gets married - no more time for listening to marching band music every Wednesday night with ol’ Snakey when you’ve got a wife.

So naturally, confronted with all these injustices, Snakey kills them all. One by one, with help from a gun casually purloined from Burt’s place, he forces all of his transgressors into increasingly strange Jigsaw-esque predicaments with his snakes. Snakey takes great joy in tormenting them in silly ways, making the preacher rub himself with a dead fish to make him smell appetizing to a tiny coral snake, and putting the man that killed his favorite snake in a big pit and throwing rattlesnakes at him until he’s too tired to kill them fast enough before they bite him. The snake-lustful teacher gets her comeuppance as well, near the end.  She keeps begging Snakey to drape more and more snakes on her, until a (slightly) remorseful Snakey finally adds the remaining highly venomous snake to the menagerie. 

Despite how grim the details of Snakey’s revenge sound on paper, in practice the film somehow maintains a gleefully cartoonish tone throughout, helped tremendously by Les Tremayne’s perfectly crotchety performance. After each death, Snakey, being the man of strict routine we know him to be, attempts to disguise his deeds the same way every time. He loads the dead body into the victim’s vehicle, drives it to a nearby cliffside, pushes the sucker off the edge, and then he contentedly marches back to his hovel through a field of sunflowers as John Phillip Sousa plays in his head.

He does this five times.

And each time, we see the camera pan down to show the pile of cars growing larger. It’s honestly hard to get across just how silly it is without seeing it yourself.  Every time there was a smash cut from a corpse to Snakey driving down the same road to the cliffside, the audience burst out laughing and cheering for ol’ Snakey! Ditto for every time he’d reveal his gun to the next target of his ire, and the film would cut immediately to them in their underwear in Snakey’s lair about to be subjected to snengeance (snake vengeance.)

More than just murdering those who’ve wronged him, he also forces his friend Burt’s (RIP) new wife to watch him commit each killing, keeping her tied to a chair throughout so that she can “learn about real suffering.” And once Snakey’s vengeance hath been wrought, he puts on the old band music, sets himself down across from his abductee, and begins to launch into an anecdote from earlier in the film. It’d be almost heartbreaking seeing this clearly lonely old man go to all this trouble just for a bit of respect and friendship, if you just block out the parts where he tortured several people to death. 

But that’s Snakes (aka Holy Wednesday) for you, equal parts maniacal silliness and gruesome sleaze. I think one scene that really epitomizes this tonal combo is when, after Snakey’s former BFF Burt explains that he can’t do their special guy nights anymore since he’s married now, Snakey leaves and then decides to just… sadly watch through the window as Burt’s new wife does a striptease for him? Again, it’d be heartbreaking if it weren’t for the context of everything else around it. 

At its core, it’s really just a movie about a lonely old weirdo raging against the world, and I think we could all use a little bit of the righteous fury of an enraged elderly man throwing armfuls of snakes at a guy who was mean to him. I know I could.

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