Blockbusters and Birdwalks

REVENGE OF NATURE, a conversation – Episode 7: “Snakes on a Plane”

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0:00 | 21:13

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa engage with herpetology, aeronautics, and the brilliance of Samuel Leroy Jackson.

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Referenced media:

  • “School Daze” (Spike Lee, 1988)
  • “Menace II Society” (The Hughes Brothers, 1993)
  • “Pulp Fiction” (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
  • “Rules of Engagement” (William Friedkin, 2000)
  • “Lethal Weapon” (Richard Donner, 1987)
  • “World War Z” (Marc Forster, 2013)
  • “Child’s Play” (Tom Holland, 1988)
  • “The Terminator” (James Cameron, 1984)
  • “Inglourious Basterds” (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
  • “X-Men” (Bryan Singer, 2000)
  • “X2” (Bryan Singer, 2003)
  • “Obsession” (Curry Barker, 2025)
  • “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” (Jon Favreau, 2026)
  • “Star Wars” (George Lucas, 1977)
  • “Jackass Number Two” (Jeff Tremaine, 2006)

 

Audio quotation:

Welcome To Blockbusters And Birdwalks

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Blockbusters and Birdwalks podcast. I am the curator, Garrett Chafenkirai. Today we have a conversation with a friend, Ed Rosa.

SPEAKER_02

That's me. Hi. My filmmaking partner and I have a YouTube channel, Toothless Richard Productions, where you can see a number of our short films.

SPEAKER_01

Nature can kill us. Nature is bigger than us, but nature is also a playground where very skillful storytellers can describe wonderful things. People as meat is high on mine for me, and I like those stories.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, absolutely.

Finale Pick Snakes On A Plane

SPEAKER_01

So this is the finale of Revenge of Nature. Oh, is it? It is. Oh man. Yeah, we've put off our finale, and that is Snakes on the Plane.

SPEAKER_03

Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. Everybody strap

Internet Buzz And The R Rating

SPEAKER_03

in.

SPEAKER_01

I can remember when this movie came out. It was a summer release in August of 2006, and that's commonly a spot where big and small studios both just kind of drop off things where they couldn't figure out where they ought to go, either because they really couldn't compete against larger blockbusters or arthouse material, or they were just so weird or badly pre-reviewed by the journalists and the like that they didn't have much expectation that they would do well. Now, all these years later, I can say that it's a terrible movie, but it has charm.

SPEAKER_00

Think of it like a roller coaster ride. Do you like roller coaster rides? No, not really. No. I mean, they always make me sick.

SPEAKER_02

The months prior to its release, I was a member of uh what I felt was a very prestigious online community. We were it was uh we were attached to Ana Cool News. You had to be invited to the to be on the message board because it didn't show up on the site. It was like hidden. There's like 50 of us or something like that. The membership was really thoughtfully uh put together, I guess, because it was tons of really smart, thoughtful people that were really passionate about film and art. That's how I became aware of this. It became a big deal on the on the on the board because we all just thought it was hilarious, like snakes on a plane, and like the whole story, like they were gonna change the title to like, you know, like the danger of flight 121 or something like that, but Sam Jackson personally was like, uh-uh, change it back. And uh they really cared about what people thought going into it, so much so that in one of possibly the only instances of this happening, the studio paid for reshoots three months after they had wrapped production to make sure that this thing got an R rating. With a with a PG-13 rating, you can get like one F bomb. Well, and and Samuel L. Jackson's association with the word motherfucker, it's basically his catchphrase.

SPEAKER_03

You college motherfuckers think y'all run everything. You owe me some money, motherfucker! I'm a mushroom cloud laying motherfucker, motherfucker. Waste the motherfuckers!

SPEAKER_02

For years I had a bad motherfucker wallet. Yeah. I mean, dude, like, and Samuel Jackson is just so cool. And I I it it's so his story is is so great, too. Like the way, you know, he didn't, he's just this little bit part guy, but you know, he got seen by the right guy, put in the right movie, and then now he's he's a pop cultural icon.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So, anyways, you know, they're like, hey, what you guys want to rated our snakes on a plane? Okay. And the studio's like, yeah, do it.

SPEAKER_01

I didn't realize that it had that kind of a backstory, regardless of my attitude and my airs about whether it's a quality entertainment, is it does make a real effort to present you with obviously graphic material. Yeah. You really do see the snakes attack people. You see a python consume a dog and a human, you see the sex making for the Mile High Club. Yeah, you hear a lot of language when it cuts loose. Right. It's kind of gnarly and impressive that way. When I must tell you, there is there is a story here, but snakes on a plane is so high concept. And aside, when I was getting my early training in film studies, there was this professor, this magic professor, who turned me on with the whole thing. And he remains like one of my favorite kind of mentor figures of all time. He had this real attitude about high concept and how terrible that is to any kind of art making or any kind of thoughtful consideration for the human condition. And I understand that. However, the good news of the high concept is in bare few words, you can pitch an entire apparatus that the world can get behind. Snakes on a plane is fully accurate. Yeah. And by the end of the movie, when Sam Jackson's character, Agent Neville Flynn, decides he's gonna pop off, that's his whole point.

Plot Setup Witness Protection In The Sky

SPEAKER_01

The set for this is uh is a jet plane with one of those double-decker first classes.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, like they used to have.

SPEAKER_01

The stakes of this thing are that we've got a witness to a crime. A DA from Los Angeles has been murdered in Hawaii, and the young man who saw that is being pursued by the mafioso who did the murdering. And that's the reason why the snakes have been released on the plane. So the parallel action then becomes that Agent Neville Flynn, Sam Jackson, is gonna escort this young man and make sure he's safe because they know that there are bad guys trying to kill him. Right. They are up in the first class being roped off because they want to protect this young man, and all the regular plebs are downstairs, and then the snakes slowly get loose in the cargo container. In parallel, Flynn's guy on the ground in Los Angeles, and that's Bobby Canavale.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, I thought it was Sebastian Manascalco. I should have looked at the credits.

SPEAKER_01

Special Agent Harris is trying to find a venom and snake expert somewhere out in the Mojave who likely sold all of these snakes, which in fact is the case, to figure out how to provide anti-venom, presuming that the plane can magically crash land safely somewhere in California and save both the witness, his friend Flynn, and as many people on board as possible. Naturally, things go wrong because snakes on a plane. Yep.

SPEAKER_02

You can't tell what they'll do. They're just such unpredictable, deadly killers.

SPEAKER_03

Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.

SPEAKER_01

The moment where I knew that I was in for a hoot, once the snakes begin to be loose, they begin to attack people one by one before the crowd understands they're under threat.

When The Movie Goes Full Gnarly

SPEAKER_01

And a dude walks into the lavatory, unzips, talks about his massive penis.

SPEAKER_03

That's my big boy.

SPEAKER_01

And a snake comes up from the lab and bites him on the dog. So those reshoots really did pay out there.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and I noticed on this viewing too. There's a ton of shots that seem to me that they were obviously shot later of people like dying in other gruesome like horror movie ways. Like one guy like falls off the stairs and like gets impaled on a spike or something.

Director David R. Ellis Backstory

SPEAKER_01

So as I pushed off from this movie, I looked up David Ellis, the director, and I didn't realize what an interesting backstory he had as a stunt performer, turned sometimes actor, turned like second unit director, first unit director, and then eventually a director of his own movies, including this one, of course. And he lived on to do more work, and I think he died quite unexpectedly, not as a terribly old person, I I think about 13, 14 years ago now. That's too bad. Right. And I think he was just at that point pressing age 60 with this established reputation of being a very good utility filmmaker, and one time behind the scenes guy as a stud performer. So a lot of his movies center on unusual activity. Added to that, I was just very aware looking at this movie and thinking about 2006, that it combines BMX racing, that's how we need our lead, this this witness. It combines kickboxing because our bad guy is a very avid kickboxer. It provides glimpses of the beautiful male body on a couple of occasions and beautiful female bodies on a couple of occasions. It tips its hat at sex and casual sex, it tips its hat in miscegenation, which I'm always interested in because that's the kind of relationship I'm involved with. It tips its hat at snakes killing people and then using their bodies as caves in which to live. It's one of those little stunt things of a snake coming, it's coming out of somebody's throat. Yep. And then just because, you know, I'm a sucker for intertext and the way that movies both are reflecting on what has influenced them and what they go on to influence. The back half of the movie, once Sam Jackson has kind of seized control of this alongside Juliana Margolise, who's playing Claire Miller, on her final voyage as a stewardess because she's about to become a lawyer. Two days to retirement. Yeah, complete overdetermination, you know. It's almost like lethal weapon. I should have retired.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, right. Yeah, she's she's she's Murtaugh.

SPEAKER_01

Totally.

SPEAKER_02

She's Murtaugh to his rigs.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And as they're working their way through all of this, they decide they're gonna barricade the sections of coach to keep the snakes on one side of all the luggage. And that's exactly what dear beautiful Brad Pitt does in World War Z.

Snake POV Cameras And Horror Gimmicks

SPEAKER_01

We get point of view from the snakes, yeah, which is green-tented, I guess, um, heat sensor imagery or something. And it's it's just dumb, but it kind of creates a a tension because we know that they know that we know we're looking at a snake's point of view while it's hunting somebody. But that's twinned with really interesting low angles, the way that a snake, if it were slithering along the floor of a plane, so you're seeing things from that vantage. I'm always thrilled by that kind of thing. For me, the first time I ever noticed that technique was with the movie Child's Play, where you're maybe two feet off of the floor at the point of view of this creature, this doll that's hunting people. It's great. Yeah. So I like the gimmick, but it's weird that it's got this green-tinted heat sensing kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_02

But taking a page of a camera's book with the terminator. Right. I suppose that's probably right. You get the HUD of the snake.

SPEAKER_01

That's exactly right. You know, these these are the things the snake can say. And then you have these direct addresses of the snakes because periodically you'll have a cobra flash up on screen, so the camera will be opposite the cobra at a foot height off of the deck of the plane, and it will flare its neck and hiss, and the the tongue will come out just so. So I'm sure that that was the dream of a crew of 40 different CGI artists. Sure. You know, working away their time in Marina Del Rey back in 05-06. Let's make the rattest snake ever. It's gimmicky and sort of silly, and we're just waiting for the strike. And so blah, when we get that, some of the people they even explain this for dummies like me who don't recognize what reptiles are really. Right. Some of the snakes will kill you instantly. Some of them it might take days, some of them won't kill you at all, but you just don't know.

SPEAKER_02

I actually went down a uh I went down an AI rabbit hole after this to find out because I was real curious. When a rattlesnake bite is like one of the least dangerous things on there, like you know you're in trouble.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. We have to have the right anti-venom to act against the venom, or we'll actually kill the victim.

SPEAKER_03

Um strange. We gotta free up grateful snakes on the plain fog, your model. Come ready for it, come up with it.

Keenan Thompson And Landing The Plane

SPEAKER_01

I did not even sort of notice that Keenan Thompson is in the past. Yeah. He is playing the childhood friend turn bodyguard of a second-tier rapper who's a germophobe. Yeah, he's Troy. And he's the great talent, he's wonderful at a at a airplane simulation game, which becomes magic because he ultimately is the guy who who lands the plane. Right.

SPEAKER_02

Which which which which that scene has the one of the most underappreciated. Everyone always the line, you know, I've enough is enough. I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. I mean, of course, that's the Christoph Waltz, right? But the book of Melanie Laurent here is the follow-up line where he where he goes, left, turn this big motherfucker left, Joy.

SPEAKER_01

I remember going to see the X-Men sequel. The first one. X2. X2. The best one. And I remember seeing that with my wife and my mother. The three of us go to see this movie, and my mom has this remark when it was done. I loved that the women were in charge of the jet. That they were the ones instrumental in certain escapes and certain maneuvers that made possible the success of the ensemble of men. Right, right. Who depended on these women to solve their problems. And she went on to say over the course of a dinner conversation, because it became kind of a thing for the evening, of how little of that was ever acknowledged before my generation. So for her generation to ever have a woman be in charge, to ever be successful in fiction or in life, was generally ignored when it did happen. Yeah. Or not praised as something we should celebrate in an invented circumstance. That's in my mind because this movie's resolution that brings everybody to safety, plane is landed by two amateur black men who save all the whiteys on board. Yeah. And there's something extraordinary and revolutionary about that idea. That those two are the very best pair of all the other options. They are the ones who will do the job. And so when he delivers that line, I'm turning left. It's like it's such an interesting little gag, but then it makes you reflect on who's saying it. Sam Jackson, who is he saying it to, Keenan Thompson, and who are they? An older and a younger black performer really coming into their prominence 20 years ago, who've remained with us as prominent people ever since. So there is a way this movie brings some weight to its genre service, which it largely succeeds at achieving all the way through. I know that I don't consider this a serious movie. I know that I don't consider it very valuable. I know I think it's mostly disposable, but I also know if the right group of people come over to my house for a cookout, I just put it on in the garage and everybody can just come and go as you please and watch the bites.

Online Hype Meets Box Office Reality

SPEAKER_02

So here's the problem, right? Like, and I found this is the problem on when you are online lots. Online tends to feel like it's the entire world. Yeah. When this movie was going to come out, I was like, oh my God, this thing is everything. This thing is going to be huge. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's always that debate. You lose viewers, you lose, you know, customers if you go up to a PG to an R from a PG 13, because then you say, Oh, well, nobody under 17 can see this. If I had a 13-year-old son that wanted to go see rated R snakes on a plane, I'm taken. But so I wasn't worried about the film's business being harmed for that, because I'm like, but dude, don't everybody's talking about this. Yeah. I'm like, if the studio's gonna actually like shell out for reshoots, this is a huge deal. Yeah. I c because this is in the heyday of the midnight screenings, right? When midnight screenings of new releases had become a thing. Now, like the you don't get a big crowd like you, like a midnight screening. It used to be like the only one, and it would sell out, and you would have this. So I was like, man, all about it. Thursday midnight, we're gonna have to get there early. This is gonna be huge. There was only one theater in town. Nobody was there.

SPEAKER_01

This movie was not either expensive nor cheap. I I clocked 33 million as its budget. That probably includes the reshoots. It barely earned that in North America. It almost doubled that in global release, which means when you put it all back to distribution and producers and you talk about the exhibitors and the share, the producers of this movie lost money.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Now, I I can't I don't know if the reason that this didn't do well was because my internet brethren failed, or if it's that warped perception of the size of the world when you're online. Yeah. If that's what it is and we did all go see it, it's just there wasn't that.

SPEAKER_01

That earlier phrase high concept I used is best applied when the stakes of production don't cost much. Because that high concept, if done cheaply, doesn't demand that a very big audience turn out. So if you and your internet brethren from that chat room and the various thousands of people that you were all connected with who then word of mouth, they're tens of thousands, if all of those people showed up and they may have opening weekend and turned $34 million of North American business, which is not nothing. But if the movie costs that, it is nothing. You should have put your money in a C D and watched it grow by five percent back in 2006. But if the movie had cost one-tenth that amount, in that opening weekend, you would have made a new gold standard of great success. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Look at it right now, we're seeing it

Why Studios Should Fund More Risks

SPEAKER_02

right now. With without obsession, obsession, yeah. And Mandalorian vs. Grogu. All right. They spent 300 million bucks on uh on that stupid movie and they're not making it. From what I understand, the budget on obsession was less than a million bucks. And it's funny because like I don't typically go in for, you know, if something's popular, I'm usually pretty skeptical, right? And certainly the majority of people that are watching obsession responded to me positively aren't doing what I'm doing, where I'm sitting there going, like, dude, this cinematographer is blowing my mind. That's been the most impressive thing about it for me, is like the actual craft of the filmmaking on display. The point is, if I'm Disney and I'm like, well, I got 300 million bucks to spend on a movie. Yeah. Well, let's see. I could do another installation, another middling installation of a failing IP that doesn't, that has that has literally two good movies and that's it. In the entire 50 years of Star Wars, it has two good movies. I could do that. Or there's a blacklist out there with 50 scripts on it that's supposed to be so good that for some reason nobody's producing. S. Craig Zoller's been on there for years. Yeah. And I'm looking at obsession going like, you know what? I think I'm gonna make $301 million movies. I'm just gonna pack the theaters with just I'm just gonna give every hungry young filmmaker with a decent idea a million bucks.

SPEAKER_01

Which is that concept of being under the tentpole. You need to have a studio that's making multiple risks, but one of them has to succeed to make everything still okay. Right. It's that creative accounting people have a problem with in Hollywood or entertainment more generally. But the fact is, if you have enough risks and you get a couple of hits, it can lift everything in an instant. Yeah. And if you made 300 risks and 90% of them fail, but 10% of them don't, oh my God, you would earn money.

SPEAKER_02

Right. You would earn so much money. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01

I was even Because that's a good hit ratio, one out of ten.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely, absolutely. Unfortunately, snakes on a plane was not the obsession that it should have been.

Release Timing And Cult Movie Afterlife

SPEAKER_01

And again, I do think it also has to do with the release schedule. That August pit, people don't go to the show much in August, especially 20 years ago. They're preparing to send their kids back to school.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's like the last week of summer. It was like August 17th or something like that.

SPEAKER_01

Being outside near water if you live by a beach or a pool or a lake or a river. I mean, you go do that stuff instead. You might do the air conditioning break. I'm I'm in my own mind famous for doing that throughout the summer. You go to the show, regardless of what it is, because you want to have free air conditioning at the price of admission. Right. So I feel as if the release schedule for this is probably what damned it, because it opened plenty wide. But my recollection, and this is just fuzzy Garrett thinking, I don't remember people coming to me the weeks after its release saying, Oh, that was so good. The people who wanted to see it, I think showed up and saw it. Right. And then they told their friends who also went to go see it, and that was just too small a group.

SPEAKER_02

There just wasn't enough of us to get the dead that were in on the joke, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01

The month after this was was released, Jackass No. Now that is the revenge of nature.

SPEAKER_02

I think that's the one where they drink horse cheese. I think that's the one. I think that's the one I took my uh my old man to see, and he just like uh short-circuiting.

Final Thoughts And Sign Off

SPEAKER_01

This is Blockbusters and Birdwalks, a conversation between Garrett Chaffin Kirai and Ed Rosa.