One day, Wes Craven got tired of making slasher flicks about killer ghosts terrorising teens in their sleep. He needed a change of pace; something real – like the horrors of voodoo in Haiti, but maybe with a killer voodoo priest terrorising a grown man in his sleep thrown in for good measure. That’s some original shit right there.
THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988)
Genre: Horror/ Thriller
Director: Wes Craven
Rated: R
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If Indiana Jones woke up to find that he’d lost his charm, good looks, and some significant points from his IQ, he’d be anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan, mincing around in the Amazon and looking remarkably like Bill Pullman.
Just a regular Joe from Boston, Alan spends his time travelling the globe and squinting at indigenous peoples, doing his best Renée Zellweger impression. Whilst investigating hallucinogenic drugs in the Amazon, Alan is offered a funky looking potion by the local Shaman and in an effort to look like Mister Big Balls, noms the whole lot.
Cue an awkward scene in which Bill Pullman is ecstatically rolling around in the undergrowth with an imaginary Jaguar whist the Shaman looks on, fapping his dick off for all we know. The fun doesn’t last however, and the totem disappears to be replaced by a pair of frisky arms from the undergrowth that go for the gonads and yank poor old Dennis into a Labyrinth style void full of yet more amorous appendages.
Dennis is in for even more glorious surprises, as when he finally snaps out of it, he finds an empty encampment and a dead pilot to boot. Being a hardy adventurer, he pisses his panties, scarpers to the nearest road, and tries to hitch a ride by crying like a punk ass bitch.
Alan’s invisible feline friend does him a solid and sees him safely back to Boston, whereupon he immediately leaves for Haiti to find some zombie powder on the corporation’s dollar, because why not? And oh boy, do things start looking up when he finds his Haitian contact has a vagina. Cue nipples! Too bad for Alan, the Tontons are ‘Hoth’ on his trail…
Tonton Macoutes – the bad ass militia – are less than pleased about Alan’s mission to track down the voodoo zombie drug and distribute it globally as an anaesthetic, so they issue him with a firm but friendly warning. Dennis responds by engaging his enormous brain powers and tries to throw them off the scent by flat out denying he’s anything other than a tourist.
Unfortunately for him, his performance was about as convincing as Bill Pullman being President of the United States, and psychically melding with aliens in an effort to further progress a plotline, and the Tontons haul his skinny ass back in to bust his balls – literally.
Surprisingly, having ones scrotal sack nailed to a chair isn’t quite the deterrent you might think it is, and Dennis continues his campaign at a steady hobble. The Tontons resort to mental torture and invade Dr. Alan’s dreams with the most terrifying prospect of all: matrimony.
After tripping what’s left of his balls off, Dennis wakes up from his nightmare to find a decapitated head in the bed next to him, in some kind of horrific homage to the Godfather, but it’s a trap! Dennis is forced onto the next plane out of Haiti at gun point with the threat of being framed for murder and lopping his victim’s head off in bed if he returns. The lucky bastard even catches a break as his zombie drug dealer sneaks on to the plane to give him the goods – for free no less! Off he flies to the good old U S of A, with his junk still attached and mission accomplished.
But if this guy had a brain, he’d be dangerous. He gets on another plane and flies back to Haiti, because clearly nightmarish visions and genital mutilation mean diddly squat. Understandably the Tontons are fucking pissed – why can’t this guy take a hint? Maybe they were too subtle. Maybe it’s time to turn his ass into a zombie.
Will the good doctor lose his soul as well as his mental faculties? Did you spot all of the Star Wars references? Will he ever get laid again with that messed up mulch of a ball bag? Find out in The Serpent and the Rainbow.
We dare you to buy The Serpent and the Rainbow on DVD!
Author Gamer Girl writes for FrontTowardsGamer.com and GamerGirlTalk.com. It is highly recommended you follow her on Twitter.
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Bill Pullman……… HAHA, GET IT?
don’t bury, me, im not dead!… i don’t know why i wrote it like that but this movie seems horrific in all the right ways
I only remember this guy as the dad from ‘Casper’…This article made this movie sound a lot more funny!
Wow this didn’t even seem bad in a good way.
so, wait… there’s neither a serpent nor a rainbow in this movie?
lol Bill Pullman, so good! another “gem”
I’m Haitian (by blood, not birth) and seeing this BS movie when I was 6 actually made me scared of Haitians for a long time. Naturally to me back then, Haitians were this far-off people that lived in some unholy place with a lot of brown paneling and spoke in fake Jamaican accents.
Yeah, someone should punch Wes Craven and his inaccurate-portraying self in the neck!
. . . that is all ^_^
I enjoyed the review, loved the scans, I was hoping to see a scan of the shaman in Amazon but you can’t put everything up I realize. I love this film, Craven did not put ENOUGH nudity/sex in it as far as I’m concerned, I mean come on VOODOO, Haiti, some lovely women too, sad.
I love Bill Pullman but not everyone shares that view I understand. LOL