大象传媒

The genius is in that title, a four word plot summation guaranteed to send a shiver of delight down any B-movie afficionado's spine. Snakes. On a Plane. For the record, Samuel L Jackson is a world-weary FBI agent charged with escorting a murder witness to Los Angeles. Bryon Lawson's crime boss doesn't want him to get there, and so arranges for a crate of poisonous snakes to be released in midflight. Presto: everything you need for a grisly evening's entertainment.

Snakes On Plane is the ultimate example of moviemaking by committee, the committee in this case being a vast blogosphere of excitable film fans who have nurtured the film from conception to release, suggesting lines, demanding more violence, designing T-shirts and so on. It's unquestionably the most fruitful movie-internet crossover since The Blair Witch Project. But is it any good? Surprisingly enough, yeah. Faced with such an enthusiastic fanbase, all that director David Ellis had to do was deliver on the promise of his brilliant title, and he has done exactly that.

"SINGLE-MINDED LOVE OF EXPLOITATIVE TRASH"

The film opens with a cursory 20 minutes of character development, during which canny viewers can amuse themselves by betting on which obnoxious passenger will cark it first, then the plane takes off and all hell slithers loose. Serpents in sick bags. Cobras in the cockpit. Boas in the bathroom. One poor chap gives new and fatal meaning to the term "trouser snake". Talk about your mortal coils. The film displays a single-minded love of exploitative trash, and you're rarely more than a minute away from a grisly death, a noisy scare, or a gratuitous breast shot. Roll on Spiders In A Hovercraft.