After loving Veronica Ricci’s performance in Ouija Nazi, I decided to check out another one of her films. Tubi’s algorithm has been recommending this one to me a lot, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull the trigger. While it’s missing the all-out fun and campy atmosphere of something like Ouija Nazi, Ricci’s presence makes it a sporadically amusing good time.
A thief steals a sacred snake statue and is shot by the cops while fleeing the museum. While hiding out in a strip club (called “Eden”), his blood mixes with the statue, which brings the snake to life. The snake bites a dancer named Trinity (Ricci), turning her into a bloodsucking snake woman. She then goes around sinking her fangs into the customers and turns her fellow strippers into her bootlicking minions.
Curse of the Snake Woman is an interesting if not entirely successful variation on the vampire genre. (It certainly mixes snake and vampire mythologies better than the awful Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire.) I will say that the cheap strip club set kind of takes some of the fun out of the whole thing. (It looks more like an Arby’s employee break room with a stripper pole set up in the middle of the room than an actual strip club.) It also doesn’t help that this is one of those edited-for-Tubi movies that have all the nudity scissored out. (Although according to the IMDb Parents Guide, it doesn’t look like I missed a whole lot.) Even then, the Tubi censors must’ve been asleep at the wheel because there are a few glimpses of skin here and there.
The subplot with the two brothers trying to get their hands on the statue eats up a lot of screen time too. They spout off a lot of exposition about the myth of the snake woman and the history of the statue, and it bogs things down after a while. The make-up on the snake woman in the end is pretty good though and is reminiscent of Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn.
The film benefits from yet another fun performance by Ricci. She’s not nearly as over the top as she was in Ouija Nazi, but she breathes a little life into her snake woman role. I wish the movie itself was worthy of her talents, but I enjoyed watching it just to see her strut her stuff. She gets some pretty good lines too, like when she rips out a guy’s guts while going down on him and quips, “I love it when a guy sprays all over my face!” Or when she tears out a customer’s tongue and says, “Keep your tongue to yourself!” She’s so hot in this that you can’t blame the dudes for falling under her spell. I know I would be helpless if she told me things like, “Can you take a shower with me? I am like, soooo dirty!”
AKA: Snake Club: Revenge of the Snake Woman. AKA: Snake Club.
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