Rattlers



Rattlers (1975) is a sort of hybrid Nature's Revenge/Government Conspiracy film. A herpetologist investigates a number of strange deaths in the desert where all the victims appear to have been bitten by hundreds of rattlesnakes. The trail leads to a military base, and it turns out that secret dumping of nerve gas is causing the snakes to go crazy. All standard enough. It was hardly unknown in the "Nature's Revenge" cycle for the military to be responsible for crazy animals. What sets Rattlers apart is that the last act forgets about the snakes almost completely, and the Colonel at the base goes crazy, kill the base's doctor, and then holes up in a mine when the police surround him. In the ensuing shootout the Colonel is killed and the snakes are apparently blown up by one of the Colonel's grenades.


They haven't found the snakes yet, but they have a lead on on a dead muskrat.

There wasn't much of a budget for snake wrangling in this movie, so there's are only two scenes where the rattlers appear in "live" footage with the actors, as opposed to close-up stock footage. One is a fairly effective bit where snakes inexplicably appear in a ranch house, and the other is a stone-cold rip-off of the bathtub scene from Shivers (1974). I was also amused by an early scene where we find out that an university animal testing lab keeps snakes in cages with unlocked doors that swing out, and the sheer number of bad toupees is noteworthy.

Posted: Mon - December 5, 2005 at      

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