homecoming8 1986's The Curse (a.k.a. The Farm) with Will Wheaton became something of a cult-classic when it was released on video. Curse II: The Bite has absolutely nothing to do with the original, for commercial reasons only it was named Curse II. That is pretty bad to begin with, but so is the entire movie. Jill Schoelen played a good role in 1987's The Stepfather but here she is kind of lost. So is the rest of the fairly unknown cast, the story just goes nowhere. It becomes boring after half an hour and what follows is rather stupid. It all makes no sense at all. Is there a positive thing about Curse II ? Yes, it's the special effects make-up from Screaming Mad George. Unfortunately you'll have to wait until the last 10 minutes but there are some great effects. Sadly they're not scary because of the ridiculous story, but they are worth watching. But that means you have to pass the other 80 minutes without falling asleep. Good luck on that one !!

slayrrr666 "Curse II: The Bite" is a marginally better sequel, but still suffers from some problems.**SPOILERS**Traveling to Bakersfield, California, Lisa Snipes, (Jill Schoelen) and her boyfriend Clark Newman, (J. Eddie Peck) are warned away from going there but decide on a shortcut to get there. Along the shortcut, they come across a horde of snakes in the road, and getting back to a hotel, he gets bitten. A fellow proprietor, Harry Morton, (Jaime Farr) offers an antidote and they leave, only for him to discover later on that it was a mutated snake which was responsible and races off to find them. While chasing them down, he begins to mutate into a deadly creature from his hand and refuses to have anyone do anything with it. Taking matters into his own hands, he goes on the run and tries to get away, only for the snake to return and force a final showdown.The Good News: As far as cheesy 80s creature features go, this one isn't that bad. The fact that the monster's origins, as well as the few early shots of the creature itself provide, the cheese here is really abundant and far too much for most to take. For the fans, though, the slimy prosthetics are prime enjoyment. They look like really cheesy creations and have the goods to back it up, as one look at them will undoubtedly do. This is nowhere more obvious than during the two transformation scenes, which come off as great as long as the cheese is preferred. Both are really fun scenes and really go all out in providing some great work in the film. The snake comes off really well and looks great as well, another factor in helping them get over, which is also aided by the fact that both occur during the big action scenes, the house massacre as well as the final confrontation at the end. Both feature these as the centerpiece of the scenes, and are therefore full of other facets that make them fun. The body count is also upped slightly compared to the past, and there's some good kills in here. One has their throat bitten out, another swallows the snake when it's forced down their throat, another is bitten around the mouth and neck, leaving a large wound around the area and another is choked out when a prehensile tongue shoots out and wraps around the neck, among others. The last big factor is the film's fast-paced finale, which is simply loads of fun. From the brutal massacre at the house, the chase to the car and the ensuing fight that leads into the construction zone and the final confrontation there is all meshed together into a spectacular series of events that leave a fantastic lasting impression due to them. These here are the film's good points.The Bad News: This one here isn't that bad, except for the cheese. That is a huge turnoff to some, and is perhaps the biggest flaw here. The make-up on the snake transformation is perhaps the most glaring, as there's plenty of obvious rubber parts used for the shots, especially once the transformation begins. The snake is shown rarely, and when the start of the change happens, there's a little more seen but it's still a really hard to tell what it is, since the few times it is the plasticity of the face is so obvious that there's no way around how bad it looks. The snake head coming out of the hand whipping and thrashing about makes for unbridled laughter more often than not. It's not so much the fact that what's going on looks cheesy, but also the fact that this one has a really easy time discerning the fake-ness of the creature in it's scenes that this is where the complaint comes from. It's action scenes get cheesy, but the fact that there's a lot of bad special effects goes against it as well. This can be seen in two scenes, the first attack in the gas station and the fight atop the car at the end, as both are pretty much hurt by both of these areas and really stand-out from the film. There's even a few other problematic scenes, including the one in the bathroom where he cuts his hand off in the hopes of ending the curse. That leads to a scene which looked like it was intended for suspense but only comes off as goofy. The lame insurance salesman following everything is rarely better, and the scenes here are pretty bad. As it stands, though, the cheesiness is the main thing keeping it down.The Final Verdict: With a little bit of good points and some really noticeable flaws, this one does have a slight factor against it. Fans of the first one or of pure cheese creature features will find a lot to like in this one, while those who tend to prefer more straight-forward, serious affair will find this one lacking seriously.Rated R: Violence, Graphic Language and a mild sex scene

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) This movie gave me a nightmare that was plugged into my subconscious by the film's show-stopper climactic scene where the young "hero" at the center of the movie starts spewing live snakes out of his gullet while trying to crawl out of a drain pipe. In my nightmare I was working as some sort of a janitor in a food service establishment (scary already) and had to clean up a bathroom where a bunch of people had vomited after eating plates of teeming little snakes. It was more of a gross-out nightmare than one that was frightening so waking up and putting it behind me was easy, though it did take me a while to figure out where the idea of people vomiting snakes had come from. Then I remembered CURSE II: THE BITE, which is kind of an OK idea I guess, executed in a way that was sort of imaginative at times. It was nice seeing Jamie Farr wearing pants on my TV set for a change, lead actress Jill Schoelen was enjoyable and looked good in her underpants, Bo Svenson seemed to enjoy playing a beer swilling Southwestern sheriff walking a fine line between arrogant corruption and duty, there are some effective shock sequences (my favorite was the one where a woman doctor looses her lower jaw: OUCH THAT'S GOTTA HURT) and the film had a good sense of it's location in the Southwestern US and it's world of interstate highways, overpasses, cowboy bars and dusty back lots. It is a serviceable time-killer with some amusing special effects as the schnook in the lead transmogrifies into a gigantic fake looking snake, and may have been a dream come true for it's special effects technicians who looked like they got some milage out of material that otherwise would have been pretty routine. With plenty of Miller Lite, Meister Brau and 7-Up for all.So the snake puking stuff is effective & evocative enough to trigger a nightmare, but the film did have one sequence that stopped the fun cold. I've been studying Snake Horror as a horror movie idiom for a while and one of the aspects about it is the very nature of exploitation at the heart & soul of the movies in question. Snakes do not attack, hunt or otherwise interact with people unless humans disturb them. Snakes also have an inescapable social function as sexual metaphors. There is of course the Adam & Eve connotations with the serpent as an embodiment of temptation or sin, tempting humans to revel in their natural tendency to have sex. Snakes are also the ultimate phallic symbol, being legless animals who's heads have a somewhat suggestive shape. It is difficult to use a snake in a movie -- especially a horror movie, since horror movies are sex movies in disguise -- and not deal with the sexual subtexts. This one does in a subtle but somewhat nauseating manner by suggesting that one of them crawled through Ms. Schoelen's unmentionables and deposited a glop of viscous green goop. Like, eww. She is also fresh out of the shower, still wet and wrapped in nary but a towel when the scene unfolds, reinforcing the perverse subtext of the scene with the snake a representation of the dark side of deviant human sexuality.All well and fine, but the images that stopped the fun cold happen before that. First, during a road trip break scene the two leads pull over, the young lady retires behind a bush for a pit stop, and the schnook she is with has to use a rifle to blow away some kind of a snake that creeps up behind her. Telling the young lass to simply get up and walk away wouldn't make for a very effective horror scene and sadly it appears that the producers opted to have a technician either shoot or otherwise blow away an actual live specimen, an unfortunate but all-too common occurrence in the history of horror films. Nobody thought twice about killing a snake since they are legless squirmy inhuman creatures: Humans like things that have 2 or 4 legs and walk about while standing up. But the real problem comes in the following scene -- inexplicably described as "hilarious" by a reviewer somewhere else -- when the two leads run over what appeared to be hundreds of actual living snakes strewn about on a stretch of road.I watched the scene in shock: Is this for real? If so it is one of the most barbaric sequences of animal cruelty yet unleashed, and following the links for producer/director Frederico Prosperi will lead one to a film called SAVAGE BEASTS, a 1978 "Nature Strikes Back" movie about zoo animals freaking out after PCP contaminates their drinking water, which used staged actual on-camera animal killings. Such behavior is beyond stupid, it is thoughtless, and a quality that many Italian made or produced films from the period have in common. Everyone knows about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and how inhuman it's animal killings are, how come nobody has protested CURSE II yet? I am more offended by how utterly stupid one would have to be to think it acceptable film-making, and the idea that people would not only be entertained by such but find it "hilarious". I have friends that keep snakes as pets & love them like they were kittens, I would not want any of them to see this movie because of that one sequence and am re-thinking my fascination with the idiom as a result of having seen it. If you have ever wondered why the movie is unavailable I would point to that as the prime reason why.4/10: Stick to the dark sexuality next time, at least the snake might get something out of it also.

Woodyanders A sterling example of how a threadbare and unpromising premise can be made genuinely creepy and effective thanks to a proficient execution. Granted, the story ain't much: Young fellow Clark (affable J. Eddie Peck) and his sweet girlfriend Lisa (a winning performance by late 80's flash-in-the-pan scream queen cutie Jill Schoelen of "The Stepfather" fame) are driving their jeep across the parched, desolate Arizona desert. The pair take an ill-advised detour off the main road and discover an old abandoned nuclear test site. Things turn sour when one of the jeep tires goes flat. Things get worse when Clark gets bitten by a radioactive snake. And, naturally, things become all the more hairy and freaky when Clark's bitten arm starts to mutate into a foul, icky, highly deadly and disgusting snake monster! As I said before, the hackneyed plot leaves plenty to be desired. However, with this supremely yucky and revolting horror movie gross-out splatterfest it's not the story that counts; it's Screaming Mad George's astonishingly vile and revolting make-up f/x and Federico Prosperi's commendably able direction which really make the difference here. Among the picture's sickening highlights are a woman's jaw being torn off, a man's heart being yanked out of his throat, and Peck vomiting forth dozens of steaming slithery snakes. The acting is uniformly tops as well: Peck and Schoelen are credible and likable leads, with solid support from Bo Svenson as a mean, intimidating jerk sheriff, Jamie Farr as a friendly, helpful salesman, "Midnight Ride" 's Savina Gersak as a kind, pious Baptist lady, Sydney Lassick as a meek, squeamish motel clerk, and "Parasite" 's Al Fann as a belligerent gas station attendant. Roberto D'Ettorre Piazoli's crisp, fluid cinematography, the eerily forbidding atmosphere, Carlo Maria Cordio's spare, shivery score, the superbly spooky use of arid, swelteringly hot and sticky New Mexico locations, and the spectacularly grotesque and hence immensely upsetting bummer ending further enhance the overall flesh-crawling uneasiness of this harrowingly unpleasant and unnerving fright film surprise.