Silent Predators (1999)

Plot Outline: In 1979, a delivery truck transporting a deadly tropical rattlesnake in southern California has an accident. The snake manages to escape into the forest to breed. Twenty years later and a new housing development in the area is blasting to clear land. The blasting awakens a nest of these venomous snakes which head straight towards the town and it's residents.

The Review: John Carpenter supposedly penned this crap as Fangs back in the 70s when he was slumming before hitting it big with Halloween. His vision was for it to include a hell of a lot more scares and jumps. Well John, that wouldn't be too hard to achieve considering there are zero scares here! I guess back in the 70s not too many people were making the utterly dreadful "monster on the loose in small town" flicks that have littered the video market in the last few years. Let's see: Spiders, Shark Attack, Marabunta, Python, King Cobra, Komodo, Bats, Fangs (unrelated) - you name the animal and I'm betting someone has turned it into a cheesy horror flick. Now it's the turn of the rattlesnake to be given the treatment (quite why it's even called Silent Predators is beyond me seeing as though there's the obvious problem of the loud rattling noise the rattlesnake makes). This film is so by-the-book it's unbelievable that people can claim to have written the script. There must just be one generic script floating around out there which studios grab a hold of and simply replace the animal with another one. They're all exactly the same, and usually awful to boot. Here we've got the town which fails to address the obvious problem because it doesn't want to lose the investment. Usually it's some sort of festival they can't afford to lose and ignore the monster but the housing development is just as bland. Characters act according to formula and not according to common sense (you know, doing stupid things simply to be put in a position of danger to try and generate some tension). Even their backgrounds and character traits are stock: there's the hero with the shady past he's trying to put behind him, the greedy developer who is just thinking about profit, the local mayor who is stuck in the middle and makes some bad calls. I've got a game for the PC called The Movies in which you run your own film studio and can write and shoot your own films. You can select how your film will pan out using the various pre-filmed scenes in the game and you can simply replace characters at your choosing. Well I guess someone has been using a proper version of this game for years because this looks like it was simply patched together from a collection of pre-determined scenes. There's no sense of cohesion with the film and some of the earlier scenes actually have more tension and purpose to them than the finale.

Final Verdict: The only surprising thing about Silent Predators is that the ending doesn't leave itself open for a sequel. This is stuff you've seen before, and hated before too.

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