Rating: C
Dir: Shuai Yang, Weixi Zhong
Star: John Ching, Shuai Shao, Taoran Shen, Wei Wei
a.k.a. She zhi zhan
Okay, the IMDb (where the film appears only under its alternate title) gives the following synopsis: “A giant sea serpent and it’s horde of aggressive minions lay siege to a cruise ship leaving a mutated oversized gorilla breaking free from the cargo hold to try and save the day.” I was about to savage the inaccuracy of this, because when I think of a “sea serpent”, I imagine something like a kraken – basically a giant squid. I could perhaps stretch to a plesiosaur, Nessie style. What we have here is neither. It’s an oversized snake. However: it is a serpent, and it is at sea. So, technically, they are not wrong, dammit.
Another alternate title, as expressed on the Chinese poster is Battle of Snakes, with which I have problems. Really, it is only the supersized one that does much. Its “minions” are hardly aggressive, though they do have a nice line in truculently falling on people. Quite how the snakes reached an altitude from which they could do so, is left discretely vague. More questionable is another alternate title, which reduces Battle of Snakes to a subheading, and goes with King Kong vs. Giant Snake. This is also known as Copyright? What Copyright? OK, I may have made the last bit up. But it’s clear where the makers here want to go. It’s a pity they run out of energy about half way through.
For the snake stuff is reasonably well-done. Zookeeper Lin Haodong (Ching) has to make his way through the ship on which his animals are being transported, in search of his poor daughter. My sympathy is engaged, not just because she is threatened by snakes, but because the subtitles say she is called Pudding. She also “suffers from pseudoautism”, which I guess is slightly better than Hipster Autism. Somehow, the decks of the ship have turned into chasms. Maybe the snakes have acid blood? Whatever the cause, it certainly makes for an exciting and extended sequence. Meanwhile, it turns out that being bitten by a snake, which has mutated due to the dumping of toxic waste in the water, will supersize the bitten. Which is how we get King Kong.
Or a Temu knockoff version anyway, which is where the film falls apart. Because it’s a not-at-all great ape, several divisions below the decent snake work. This culminates in a lacklustre fight between the two, before the few human survivors are eventually able to bail on a lifeboat. There’s one final bit of heroic sacrifice, when the craft’s propeller gets fouled and someone has to go fix it. Might that someone have been bitten earlier in the movie, and is now sporting a nasty snake hickey? Just sayin’. However, the film’s fuel gauge of interest had hit the empty mark well before that point, and I had consequently ceased to give much of a damn.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.