Department Sssssss

What I’ve Been Watching:  Sssssss (1973).

Who’s Responsible:  Bernard L. Kowalski (director); Hal Dresner, Dan Striepeke (screenwriters); Strother Martin, Dirk Benedict, Heather Menzies (stars).

Why I Watched It:  Slavish devotion to the genre.

Seen It Before?  Yes.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10):  6.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10):  3.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10):  5.

And?  I disliked this when I saw it as kid (although I was surprised not to find one of my trademark 3″ x 5″ index cards documenting that; maybe I didn’t see it all the way through, and thus had to disqualify it), primarily because it’s such a downer, or perhaps I should say “a wrist-ssssssslitter.”  Cutting to the chase, it’s about a guy who gets turned into a snake.  I misremembered—on several counts—that it ended with a shock reveal of said snake-guy on display in a carnival sideshow, a shot that I’m still convinced was a deliberate homage to the notorious “human duck” (Olga Baclanova) at the close of Tod Browning’s twisted classic, Freaks (1932)…but it’s neither the ending nor the poor protagonist, David Blake.

It’s probably more accurate to say that I’d assumed, rather than misremembered, it to be a bargain-basement production, especially coming from Kowalski, the director of Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), who worked primarily in television and helmed the notorious bomb Krakatoa: East [sic] of Java (1968).  So it was with some surprise that I discovered it was from a major studio, Universal, and the famed Zanuck/Brown production team that, incredibly, made The Sting the same year, and went back to zoological terror with Jaws (1975).  Accordingly, it has a polished look that I was not expecting, photographed by a serial Emmy Award nominee, Gerald Perry Finnerman.

Sssssssupremely sssssssilly and sssssssorta sssssssadistic, it’s from a long line of movies in which mad scientists try to hybridize humans with other species, thus enabling ours to survive a looming threat.  In this case, ophiologist Dr. Carl Stoner (Martin) theorizes that becoming literally cold-blooded will see us through once we’ve squandered all of those increasingly scarce fossil fuels, and endeavors to prove his point with David (Benedict).  Yet while rigorously conventional in that way, the film is unique in another, marking the sole effort as writer (sharing credit with Hal Dresner) or producer of makeup artist Dan Striepeke, an Oscar nominee for Forrest Gump (1994) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

We open as Stoner helps Kogen (Tim O’Connor) load his truck with a coffin-sized crate containing…something alive that he has just sold to the sideshow proprietor.  On a visit to the nearby college, Stoner asks pompous colleague Dr. Ken Daniels (Richard B. Shull) to extend his research grant, but it doesn’t sound very promising because he’s, y’know, a mad scientist, and their ideas rarely go down well with academia.  He also mentions that his last assistant, Tim McGraw…left rather abruptly—an illness in the family, I believe—and could he please have another, so Daniels sends him home with David, who’s hunky and amiable enough to attract the attention of Stoner’s daughter/assistant, Kristina (Menzies).

David’s not overly endowed with intelligence, though, so he’s naively acquiescent as the doc starts pumping him full of injections that give him strange dreams, and purport to be precautionary antivenom.  The Stoners, y’see, eke out a living selling venom milked from their extensive snake collection, augmented with paltry donations from local yokels who come and watch the doc risk his life dancing around with a king cobra, although probably more in the ghoulish hope of seeing him fatally bitten than for entertainment value alone.  Speaking of which, visiting the carny, David sees the, um, extremely realistic Snake Man (Nobel [sic] Craig), and you’d have to be dumber than he is not to suss that it’s McGraw.

Surprisingly, that makeup is credited not to Striepeke (who worked on four Planet of the Apes films and the TV series)—although he reportedly had an uncredited hand in it—but to the maestro himself, John Chambers, and Nick Marcellino.  Unsurprisingly, it’s really, really good, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who recalls that image more than anything else in the film, which as we’ll see is a double-edged sword.  Anyway, re-enter classmate Steve Randall (Reb Brown, TV’s pilloried Captain America), whom we’ve seen bullying David at the school and coming on to Kristina at the carnival; climbing uninvited into her window one night, he is surprised by, and breaks the neck of, one of their beloved snakes.

Although that probably violated any number of statutes, Stoner favors private justice, so he slips a black mamba into Steve’s shower.  When Daniels visits soon after, he brings two pieces of news:  the refusal of Stoner’s grant request (shocker), and the death of football star Steve from a “heart attack”; curiosity piqued by the doc’s reaction, or lack thereof, he starts to snoop around, which amounts to signing your own death warrant in such movies.  Sure enough, just after getting a glimpse of David—who’s turning progressively greener and scalier—through a window, he’s clonked on the head, awakening in the cellar where he quickly falls victim to a python, last seen as a shoe protruding from the snake’s maw.

Mindful of the fact that even Kristina might notice David’s new emerald complexion, and concerned about the ramifications of their growing attraction, Stoner has sent her off on a wild snake chase to pick up a nonexistent delivery.  She then just happens to learn of the, um, extremely realistic Snake Man and, upon sneaking into the carny after hours to check it out, is horrified to find Tim.  Meanwhile, once David has completed his transformation into an actual snake—which, alas, is a lot less visually or dramatically interesting than the Snake Man—Stoner commands “an audience” with the cobra, informing the ex-king that he has been dethroned by a new species with the body of a snake and the mind of a man.

Evidently “his majesty” doesn’t take the news well, because he bites Stoner to death, and it’s unclear whether the doc became inexplicably suicidal, or his luck finally just ran out.  Just then, Kristina comes home, and although she might reasonably be miffed at Dad for turning Tim into the consummate sideshow freak, she’s not happy to see him lying there dead, and even less so when the cobra menaces her.  A sharpshooting cop’s timely arrival ends that threat, but worse waits inside, where a frantic mongoose (which they evidently kept around just as a precaution) suddenly manages to escape from his cage and goes for the throat of her ex-boyfriend; we end with a freeze-frame on Kristina’s screaming face.

What a happy story, and admittedly unusual in that respect, although in a way, the ending is (as AllMovie critic Donald Guarisco called it) “anticlimactic” after the amazing Snake-Man scenes.  Okay, I know he’s a mad scientist, but even with that in mind, it’s difficult to understand Stoner’s plan; even with human brains, how would our reptilian successors inherit the Earth, lacking both the power of speech and opposable thumbs…or opposable anything else, for that matter?  Or are they just supposed to go back to nature?  And how, in the short term, did he think he could keep all of that a secret?  These gaping plot holes, and the casualness with which David is subjected to such horror, didn’t endear this to me.

Frequently cast with offscreen pal L.Q. Jones, and perhaps best known for his “failure to communicate” line from Cool Hand Luke (1967), character actor Ssssssstrother Martin is probably worthy of a post in his own right.  His films include such BOF favorites as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Wild Bunch (1969), and—speaking of “Stoners”—Up in Smoke (1978).  Tellingly, I associate the supporting players most readily with genre TV series:  Benedict was Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, Menzies essayed Jessica on the ill-fated Logan’s Run, Shull partnered with android cop John Schuck on Holmes and Yo-Yo, and O’Connor showed his benevolent side as Dr. Huer on Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century.