Without the great German madman Klaus Kinski(AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD) and the alcohol-infused Englishman Oliver Reed(THE DEVILS) having main parts in this film and having lots of great exchanges between each other this would probably not be very memorable. But thanks to these two and the lovely Susan George from STRAW DOGS who we get to ogle in her underpants this movie is at least mildly amusing to lovers of campy throwaway thriller fluff.
The main story here concerns two kidnappers(Kinski and Reed) who plan on holding a little namby-pamby wuss of an asthmatic rich kid hostage. Thrown into this simple tale is a super venomous black mamba snake who is loose and enjoys biting people right in the face and killing them. It's a little weird how I just recently viewed THE SADIST and in that film a bunch of snakes are the heroes and in this film we also get a snake who basically gets the role of the heroic action star of the film in his spare time when he's not playing the menacing monster. So basically what you get here is a tense hostage standoff flick with an animal on the loose monster flick shoved in there for added thrills.
While the movie is a little too slick-looking for me and the acting is pretty awful(with the exception of our two bad guys) this might be worth a look if you dig crazy old European actors. Also there are some crazy stories behind the scenes which may or may not be true about how Reed would get extremely drunk and challenge Kinski to brawl. This caused original director Tobe Hooper to flee his job and go work on POLTERGEIST instead which may have been a wise decision. If only someone had a camera to record that action we might have had a truly classic film here.
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