This is really a bad movie. Decent actors given no material to work with, decent camera-work, a premise that could have been fun, special effects of variable quality (the scenes of snakes entering people's bodies are quite well done), and direction with no sense of pace and no attempt at creating suspense add up to...nothing much.
We open with a young Hispanic couple in the desert. The woman is ill, and vomits repeatedly: first disgorging green Jello, then snakes. They get on a train. The plot is in motion.
We meet the various characters and wonder who will survive. Who will be the Last Girl? More importantly, how can the railroad stay in business running a train from El Paso to Los Angeles with a little over a dozen people aboard? There's a young Anglo couple with a daughter about six years old. We know that the parents are dead meat. It's an unpleasant surprise that after the parents are dispatched we see the screaming child eaten alive by a giant snake.
Someone will piously state that bad things actually do happen to children in real life. Sure. But this isn't real life; it's a cheap exploitation movie cashing in on Samuel L. Jackson's big budget thriller, hoping that Blockbuster customers won't look too closely at the DVD box.
The ending is ambitious, but these people didn't have the chops to pull it off. A giant snake slithers across the top of the train, gets ahead of it, and swallows it. Half a dozen characters jump from the train just before the last car is swallowed. Then a magic tornado comes and does something with the snake. Whatever. But it's gone, and the survivors begin walking to find civilization. Of course we see that one woman has a snakebite on her leg, and assume that the whole cycle will start over.
I watched it on Chiller, so I didn't have a rental fee. If I had rented it, I'd have felt like I was robbed.
Most of the dialog is just filler. After all, dialog scenes are cheaper to film than those that involve special effects.
We open with a young Hispanic couple in the desert. The woman is ill, and vomits repeatedly: first disgorging green Jello, then snakes. They get on a train. The plot is in motion.
We meet the various characters and wonder who will survive. Who will be the Last Girl? More importantly, how can the railroad stay in business running a train from El Paso to Los Angeles with a little over a dozen people aboard? There's a young Anglo couple with a daughter about six years old. We know that the parents are dead meat. It's an unpleasant surprise that after the parents are dispatched we see the screaming child eaten alive by a giant snake.
Someone will piously state that bad things actually do happen to children in real life. Sure. But this isn't real life; it's a cheap exploitation movie cashing in on Samuel L. Jackson's big budget thriller, hoping that Blockbuster customers won't look too closely at the DVD box.
The ending is ambitious, but these people didn't have the chops to pull it off. A giant snake slithers across the top of the train, gets ahead of it, and swallows it. Half a dozen characters jump from the train just before the last car is swallowed. Then a magic tornado comes and does something with the snake. Whatever. But it's gone, and the survivors begin walking to find civilization. Of course we see that one woman has a snakebite on her leg, and assume that the whole cycle will start over.
I watched it on Chiller, so I didn't have a rental fee. If I had rented it, I'd have felt like I was robbed.
Most of the dialog is just filler. After all, dialog scenes are cheaper to film than those that involve special effects.