Snakes attack a train … Okay, there’s slightly more plot than that, but not much. A woman is stricken with a curse that turns her stomach into an incubator for snake eggs that gnaw their way out of her upon hatching. However, the woman survives this ordeal but must collect those snakes so some Mayan medicine man in Los Angeles can purge her of the curse. Once she gathers them all, she hops on a train to the City of Angels, only for the snakes to escape and attack the passengers. Oh, then the woman transforms into a giant snake herself and eats the train.
The studio behind “Snakes on a Train,” the Asylum, clearly thought that the Samuel L. Jackson-led “Snakes on a Plane” was too subtle and needed to be pushed over the edge into levels of insanity never before imagined. This film occupies a weird quagmire between “so bad it’s good” and “so bad it’s bad.” The characters are both over-the-top and totally bland. The story, though ripped off from its big-budget counterpart, packs in countless narrative (and inexplicable) surprises, to the point that it comes off as somehow unique. Forget the unified field theory or the meaning of life –- scientists and theologians should collaborate on figuring out the how, why, when, where, and what of “Snakes on a Train.”
