The Curse II: The Bite
is a movie that must have seemed like a good idea on paper but on screen it is
fairly dull. Most of the movie is watching a young couple drive around and talk
about how in love they are. The characters are poorly developed and the story
is ludicrous. There are a few gory moments that are interesting to watch but it
only happens at the last few minutes of the movie so by then it is too little
too late.
Lisa and Clark are a young couple traveling across the
country. They have a few mishaps involving hundreds of snakes on their travels.
One snake climbs into their car and bites Clark in the left hand. The snake was
apparently radioactive or something because the bite is slowing transforming
Clark’s hand into a living snake.
The acting is so-so at best. Nobody acts as if the situation
is real. They simply see a guy with a snakebite acting like a psychopath and
figure he is just being a turd and they can shrug it off. At no point is going
to the hospital an option until he is forced to go there. By that point he has
a living snake on his hand that for some reason goes right for the mouths of
his victims.
If there is a redeeming feature to this movie it is that
Jamie Farr plays a doctor. At first I was not sure if he would be able to pull
off an entertaining role in this movie but sure enough he had a decent amount
of charm when he was on-screen. The other character that was trying hard, given
the material, was Jill Schoelen as Lisa. She had a much more recognizable role
later in her life as the daughter in the movie The Stepfather. She actually tries to make the material work.
The pacing is unfortunate. It feels like this movie would
have been about 30 minutes long if they simply cut out the filler material like
driving over hundreds of snakes in the middle of the road. It added nothing,
and besides being odd, it really does not create an atmosphere of horror. The
puppets do not even seem to be creative. They are lazily flopped about and it
makes me wonder why Curtis has not cut off his own evil hand like Ash in Evil Dead II.
I was not sure if they were attempting to make an
environmental message at one point telling the audience straight out that the
world is blowing up weapons under ground and dumping things all over the
environment. It is such a glancing conversation that they could have discussed
their favorite host of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it would have added as
much to the movie. I suppose that they wanted the audience to think that the
snakes were somehow mutated by the radiation so their bite can do things that
are borderline magic to a person.
Even the music choices are lazy. When about to have a sex
scene the young lovers, Lisa and Clark, turn on a radio that plays some soft-core
porno riff that could have taken 4 minutes on a Casio keyboard to make. There
is nothing that differentiates this movie from the many others like it. It just
feels like a product of its time that was made to be VHS rental fodder.
The Curse II: The Bite
is not scary, it is not entertaining, and it is not funny. At its bare bones it
is another movie that tries hard to rip-off the formula that movies like The
Wolf Man have perfected. There is nothing clever or overly creative and it comes
off as boring with nothing of value. If there were considerable re-writes this
movie might have potential but as it is this movie is not anything but a
forgettable film.
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