Python (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

There is a full-length commentary by the director and some of the f/x people. It is pretty amusing because they obviously didn't take the film too seriously. It offers a lot of insight into low-budget filmmaking, and they get a real kick out of making fun of their producer. The commentary is, by far, the best thing about the DVD.

But the advertising for the DVD never mentions the commentary. The DVD box never mentions it. It's not listed on the main menu or in the special features. It is hidden in the "sound set-up" menu, which I normally ignore, so I found it by accident.

Y'know, the bitch is in the details. I think this anecdote tells you a lot about the film: they had some cool ideas, but didn't know how to deliver them.

It's your basic "mad doctor creates giant snake" flick, and is trapped somewhere between genre and genre parody. Some of the characters and situations are played strictly for broad laughs, while other situations are played for realism and horror thrills, and other characters are played straight.  You can't accept it as a comedy, because it will go on for thirty minutes with no attempt at humor, and those thirty minutes may be filled with truly grisly violence. Robert Englund (Freddie Kruger) brings some genuinely scary high-camp gravitas to his mad doctor role. But then other characters act like they are in a vaudeville skit about a big snake, and are played strictly for slapstick laughs, like a real estate agent and Jenny McCarthy as his potential buyer, or a goofy Barney Fife deputy who says things like "I am the law here." Casper Van Dien was in the middle road. He couldn't seem to decide whether he was supposed to be funny. Using one of the strangest and least consistent accents ever, he actually changes accents in mid-sentence ... with the same word. At one point, he's looking at a map and says something like "it must be between HE-ERR and HE-YEAH" - two completely different readings on the word "here". Odd stuff. I think he was trying for some kind of Louisiana Cajun, but I can't imagine why he didn't just do the thing with his natural speech - the character he played could have come from anywhere and it wouldn't have mattered to the script.

The tone changes and inconsistencies are disconcerting. Does it want to be a scary big creature movie or does it want to make fun of big creature movies? It never decides and, as a result, I just never could get into the film's rhythm; couldn't stay in the right frame of mind.

The commentary suggests that the tone shifts occur because the film essentially had two different directors. The assigned director speaks somewhat scornfully of the opening airplane sequence, which he did not shoot and did not want in the film (he tore the scene out of the script). The producer filmed some parts of the scene, and somebody else filmed other set-ups for the scene, and the producer added this prologue without the director's permission. It is played for grim realism, with no humor at all. Then the very next scene involves the giant snake sneaking up on two campers - and the director notes that the producer wanted the campers to be lesbians, not because it was such a good idea, but because he just likes to insert lesbian sex scenes whenever possible.

Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

... I wish that guy had produced "The English Patient"