Snake Outta Compton (2018)

Directed by Hank Braxtan [Other horror films: Evil Deeds 2 (2010, segment ‘The Hebrew Hacker’), Blood Effects (2011), Chemical Peel (2014), Unnatural (2015)]

To quote N.W.A, you are now about to witness the strength of snake knowledge. I’m not trying to mock N.W.A. – that’s how the film starts out.

I know what I was expecting with this one. A bad movie, certainly, but an interesting mixture of generic rappers versus a bunch of snakes. What I wasn’t expecting was a parody film, which is quite a bit of what Snake Outta Compton is, and boy, is it a hard movie to watch.

The snake looked terrible (and yes, it was just a single snake as opposed to a nest), but that really plays no part in just how bad this movie is. I don’t know what was worse – the character Vurkel (a parody of Urkle from Family Matters, complete with the glasses and suspenders) or the characters Denz and Ethan (rip-offs from the 1999 Training Day, starring, you guessed it, Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke). Or the rap battle against the snake.

Yeah, this movie went places that weren’t locations much worthy of a visit.

There are a few meager things about this I liked, though not enough to boast this above the atrocious rating it’s going to get. For one, a few of the rap lines here were decent, my favorite being ‘cold-blooded showman like Frosty the Snowman’, and another one made reference to Godzilla, Mothra, and Ghidorah. Also, Arielle Brachfeld, who played a white girl who did everything possible to act black and thug, was sort of funny. Her character was pretty terrible, but she had heart, and was about the only character (and I do mean only) that was worth anything.

Otherwise, this movie is really cringy. Why they chose a twenty year old action movie to parody, I have no damn idea, but it doesn’t work at all, and the movie was just as terrible as a movie could be. Vurkel’s character arc was awful (by the end, he becomes a part-snake superhero, because of course he does), and overall, this movie was just painful to watch.

I was really hoping for something else when I marked this to record on my DVR. Like I said, I wasn’t expecting anything stellar, but I definitely didn’t see a parody coming, and boy, was this an utter disappointment, almost entirely void of worth. Not something I’d recommend unless you’re high as fuck and want a good time. I wasn’t, and thus, no good time to be had.

1.5/10