CENTIPEDE HORROR / CALAMITY OF SNAKES (1982)
If you're going to do a double bill, you might as well go hogshit wild, and that's exactly what I did do the detriment of my own sanity with back-to-back viewings of CENTIPEDE HORROR and CALAMITY OF SNAKES, both from 1982 and both stupid in their own unique ways.
CENTIPEDE HORROR finds the grandchildren of a man who burnt down a village 50 years ago being punished by a powerful sorcerer, and the recipe for this particular punishment is centipedes. Lots and lots of really big centipedes. The film opens with shocker shots of centipedes crawling across wooden platforms, emerging from the shadows and poking their little pincers out from drooping foliage. If I were the type of person to get skeeved out by these shots and the chitter-chitter-chitter SFX that accompany them, buddy, this flick woulda been turned off quick.
What follows is roughly 90 minutes of centipede curses, a few solid gross-up close-ups and a climax that finds two wizards dueling from afar in the ultimate battle of the mind that includes not one, not two, but at least three ghost chickens. Describing this in vague terms is about four times as fun as actually watching CENTIPEDE HORROR, which comes from director Keith Lee Pak-Ling and has enough lulls between its standout moments to put a human centipede to sleep.
It is, however, a positively delightful experience when placed next to the following feature, which aims to top even the most abundant acts of animal cruelty on film with one central, slithering focus.
In a bold move that would leave Indiana Jones positively beaming, Chi Chang and his team of dipshits decided to make a film about karmic retribution for cruelly killing snakes by… cruelly killing a bunch of snakes. This isn't like a single lingering scene of a turtle being torn apart that you can skip in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, this is CALAMITY OF SNAKES, and it lives and dies by its title while its creators dance like lunatics in a special circle of Snake Hell.
The story revolves around a greedy company buying up land for a massive condo and cutting corners during the construction process. One of those corners happens to be the nest of snakes living on the land, so they dispose of them all in the meanest and laziest way possible. Ignoring a couple scattered pleas warning against this, the workers pick up their shovels and start chopping up snakes while the boss man hops in an excavator and mashes hundreds of snakes to a bloody pulp in a few gleeful scoops.
It's not like the filmmakers were ignorant during all of this. It's in the script that there will be some form of divine retribution for the acts of the characters, so does that apply to the crew, as well? Either way it clearly doesn't matter, because construction continues and we're eventually treated to a condo full of residents screaming and writhing as snakes are tossed their way and then summarily executed for the crime of starring in a rather shitty film.
To give you an idea of what CALAMITY OF SNAKES is working with, the Blu-ray from Unearthed Films has a "cruelty-free" version of the feature on-disc, and it's 10 MINUTES SHORTER. A few of those minutes are spent filming various animal fights as they send in some mongooses to take out the snakes, a sequence that goes on for so long I had to fast forward out of sheer boredom. It's a shame, because there are some entertaining moments throughout—including a martial arts master who has to fight a colossal python—and it has a sense of humor about its dumb-as-rocks premise, but they went about the production in the stupidest and most shameful of ways.
So, in the Great Centipedes Vs. Snakes Battle of 1982, I gotta give it up for CENTIPEDE HORROR. Some centipedes may have been harmed during the filming of this motion picture, but it certainly wasn't a multipedal massacre.
