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I'm mentioned before in this movie blog of mine that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s I was a very frequent visitor to my local video rental shops, and rented numerous videos during those years, many of which, moreover, have never been released on DVD. With the coming of online sites selling such videos, however, I have been able to track down and purchase a fair few of them, to rewatch whenever I want to. In addition, I have even successfully located and purchased some of the ones whose boxes' cover artwork I still well remember seeing in those selfsame, now long-bygone shops but whose actual videos I never got around to renting back then.
The movie under review here today is one of those latter noticed but never-rented ones, and now, having watched it last night a mere 34 years since its release, I finally understand precisely what the bizarre dog-headed/serpent-jawed entity is that we see depicted so dramatically in its 1989 big box ex-rental UK video's very striking front cover artwork (reproduced above) – but more about that later. The movie in question is The Bite, aka Curse II: The Bite (again, I'll explain its alternative title later).
SPOILER ALERT!! – As I haven't found a detailed plot synopsis for this nowadays largely-forgotten monster/horror movie anywhere, I'm providing one here, so if you don’t want to know its storyline, read no further!!
Directed by Frederico Prosperini (but named as Frederick Goodwin in the credits) in his only directorial outing, produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis, and released on the big screen in 1989 by MGM, but also in the same year on video (and laser disc) by Trans World Entertainment, as well as on Blu-Ray in 2016 by Shout! Factory, The Bite opens with some menacing music and a brief scene of some hazard-besuited workers in an area of New Mexican desert gingerly handling some squirming snakes with the assistance of long poles. This remote area, having been used back then by the military for nuclear tests, is now cordoned off and abandoned, but that does not prevent snakes from crawling back and forth between its wire cordons, thereby free to enter the open country and traverse the highways encompassing it.
Nor does it stop a couple of 20-somethings, Clark Newman (played by J. Eddie Peck) and his girlfriend Lisa Snipes (Jill Schoelen), ignoring the advice of a petrol station attendant not to drive through that ominous zone but take a much longer yet far safer alternative route to reach their Californian destination. So off they drive in their truck, blissfully unaware of the dire dangers awaiting them due to their recklessness.
When their truck suffers a type puncture in the midst of this tainted terrain, Lisa steps out while Clark attempts a temporary fix for the tyre, and is only saved from being bitten by a literal snake in the grass when Clark spies the reptile and shoots it dead. What neither of them realize, however, is that in the meantime a second snake has surreptitiously entered their truck. And don't forget, these snakes have been exposed to nuclear radioactivity… If you think that this movie's plot is heading down radioactive spider/Spider-Man territory, you'd be right, but it's not doing so in a good way!
After encountering and having to drive over a horrifying horde of writhing, wriggling snakes stretching across the entire breadth of the highway, the two reach a petrol station where its unpleasantly terse, rifle-toting proprietor (Al Fann) charges Clark an extortionate sum for a replacement tyre. While waiting for him to fit it, Clark sees a photo of a very handsome dog pinned near the station's office door, and the proprietor tells him that it was his pet dog Lady, who was bitten by a snake around here and could not be saved. When Clark visits the station office's rest room, however, he distinctly hears a dog whining in a dark under-stairs basement, but is angrily frog-marched back upstairs by the gun-wielding proprietor.
Once Clark and Lisa have driven off, the proprietor ventures down into that under-stairs basement with some food for the creature, who is indeed Lady, caged but still very much alive – yet also very much changed. Without warning, Lady lunges forward and fatally attacks the proprietor who had approached too close to her enclosure, and her face is revealed to be no longer the handsome visage in the photo but instead a hideous mutated montage of dog and snake – thereby explaining the video's front cover artwork, which had always seemed to me to resemble some form of monstrous dog but with a snake's jaws, yet that sounded too bizarre to be tenable. Turns out I was right all along!
Making another stop further along their route, this time at a small motel to spend the night there, Clark and Lisa get out of the truck, but when attempting to remove some of their luggage from the back of their vehicle, Clark is bitten on his left hand by the snake that has been lurking unseen there, with the snake then speeding off towards the motel. Staying there is a man there who has some snake venom antidote, so he gives Clark an injection. However, he turns out not to be a doctor, as Clark and Lisa had initially assumed, but merely a travelling salesman named Harry Morton (Jamie Farr) who carries snake venom antidotes with him as a precaution in case he ever gets bitten during his own long-distance journeys. Moreover, Lisa discovers soon afterwards that the snake has entered their room, but she successfully kills it before it has chance to bite anyone else.
After Clark and Lisa drive off the next morning, Morton examines the snake's carcase, only to discover to his horror that it was an extremely venomous species, whereas he had injected Clark with a vaccine for a totally different, much less venomous one. So he decides to track down Clark to give him the correct injection as quickly as possible, and engages via CB Radio a number of trucker friends to assist him in his search.
Meanwhile, as they continue their own truck journey, laughing and joking together now that his bite has been treated, Clark declares in jest that he would commit hara-kiri before ever hurting a single hair on Lisa's head, and later they stop briefly at a drug store for Clark to have his hand and arm bandaged properly. However, Clark subsequently becomes feverish and uncharacteristically aggressive – and when he irrationally lashes out at Lisa physically after they stop at a music venue that she wants to visit despite Clark feeling seriously ill by now, an enraged Lisa tells him to drop her off somewhere, anywhere, the next morning, as she no longer wants to be with him.
Before Clark has chance to do so, however, they are stopped by a police car for speeding, and when Clark refuses to take off the bandage on his hand and arm, the older, arrogantly officious cop (Bo Svenson), suspecting that drugs are concealed inside it, promptly arrests him and locks him in the back of the police car, telling his younger partner to keep watch on Clark while he attends to a call of nature. When the younger police officer leans into the back, however, Clark's arm attacks him, like a veritable snake! And does the same when the older officer returns.
Free of the cops, Lisa now realizes that Clark is very sick, so she drives him in their truck to a hospital, where, almost comatose, he is examined by a physician, Dr Marder (Sandra Sexton). After sedating him, she begins to cut off his hand and arm's bandaging, and is shocked to find that his hand is scaly and reptilian in form.
Deciding to take a blood sample for analysis, Dr Marder does so, only to see in astonishment that the tissues of his distorted hand contain not only a pair of eyes looking back at her but also a pair of fanged jaws, which lunge at her face, seizing her chin and killing her. The bite from the snake that had been exposed to nuclear radiation has transformed Clarke's hand and arm into a hideous, mutated snake, which is still physically attached to his shoulder like his arm was but comes complete with a head and lethal jaws!
And just when a now fully-awake and wholly-horrified Clark thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, who should walk into his room and see everything, having finally tracked him down, but Morton! Talk about bad timing! The movie's viewers watch a babbling, thoroughly terrified Morton slowly backing away from Clark, cowering and collapsing onto the floor as Clark draws ever nearer…
The next that we see, however, is Clark charging down a corridor to the hospital's entrance where he ignores Lisa waiting there, jumps into the truck, and drives off, abandoning Lisa on the hospital forecourt. After driving for a while, Clark stops at a petrol station, steals an axe from the garage there while the pump attendant is filling his truck with petrol, then enters the station's rest room, where he grimly uses the axe to chop off his left hand, and thence the head of the mutant snake that his arm has apparently become, in the desperate hope that doing so will kill this foul monstrosity.
Shortly afterwards, a frantic Clark is rescued by a married couple who take him into their house to rest there for the evening as a torrential rainstorm is underway. Later that same evening Lisa also arrives there, having tracked him down, so they let her stay too. The couple have a young daughter who is intensely curious about Clark's bandaged arm, wanting to see what is underneath the bandage, but her parents tell her that it is none of their business. Inevitably, however, the child's curiosity becomes too great to resist, and so, wielding a pointed toy sword, she sneaks into the bedroom where Clark and Lisa are sleeping, and prods at the bandage with the sword's tip until it begins to come loose – exposing the demoniacal serpent that Clark's arm has become!
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Yes indeed, the monstrous entity has regenerated a new head, and when its jaws open wide to reveal its venom-dripping fangs, the child screams in terror and backs away, waking Clark, Lisa, and the child's parents. When her father enters the room with a shotgun, the arm-serpent lunges at his face, killing him. After it then sprays Lisa in her face with venom, she flees out of its reach (despite its independent behaviour, it is still physically attached to Clark's shoulder) before it can bite her. Clark chases after Lisa, and as she leaps into their truck he leaps onto its roof, which, as it turns out, is the last time that Clark moves like a human, swiftly transforming even further into a snake.
Indeed, from here on in, events veer off in an increasingly grotesque, stomach-churning direction. As Lisa drives, Clark's head leans down over the windscreen from his position on the truck's roof above her, and as he stares at her, his contorted face a mask of agony, thick gelatinous globules are vomited forth from his throat, with each globule containing a baby snake that breaks out of it, so that the windscreen is soon covered with small writhing snakes. The distraction caused by this horrifying sight sends Lisa careering off the road onto a construction site, where the truck plunges down into a works trench.
Lisa escapes from the truck unharmed, but because of the torrential rain the steep muddy sides of the trench are too slippery for her to be able to climb up them. So she begins running along the trench, away from the truck, and Clark, who tumbles off its roof and into the trench, whereupon he begins undulating on the ground like a snake as he attempts to pursue her. The trench leads to a corrugated metal tunnel that Lisa runs through, only to find the far end sealed by wire meshing, and with Clark drawing ever closer after entering the tunnel behind her.
After several frantic attempts, however, Lisa finally manages to kick the meshing off and dives through the tunnel's exit, only to plummet into a mudpit several feet below that has become a veritable lake due to the torrential rain. As she half-swims, half-crawls across it, Clark appears at the end of the tunnel, opens his mouth, and regurgitates a series of much larger snakes this time, all of which drop into the water behind Lisa, followed by Clark himself, with his left arm now a fully-formed snake with a huge head and immense fangs. Eventually, Clark succeeds in cornering Lisa at the edge of the water, and as he approaches her she grabs a long metal pole and tries to fend him off – until he grabs it with his remaining human hand and arm.
Fully expecting him to strike her down with it, Lisa gazes at him in horror, but Clark does something very different. He plunges the pole through his own torso, impaling himself with the force, and thereby providing the ultimate, tragic confirmation of something that he'd said to her on that fateful morning after having been bitten – he'd sooner commit hara-kiri than ever hurt her. Lisa leans forward to tenderly stroke Clark's agonised face, realizing what he has done, and why – but as she does so, his head falls back, and even though the Clark she had known and loved is now dead, his mouth opens wide, hideously wide, like the unhinged jaws of a snake about to swallow its prey…
Terrified, Lisa flees, without looking back, so she is unaware of the enormous snake that Clark's body has now transformed into and which is very much alive. It slips into the rain-created lake of water, submerging itself as it swims underwater in pursuit of Lisa. Just at that moment, however, a fleet of police cars arrive on the scene, with the leading one containing not only the arrogant cop who'd arrested Clark earlier but also Morton, both having somehow survived after all.
They had been tracking Lisa in her truck, hoping to rescue her after Morton had explained everything to the cop, and now another of them throws a rope down to her in the lake, to haul her up. But just as she begins to ascend, the enormous snake bursts up through the water behind her in a menacing fully-vertical rearing pose, towering over Lisa and confronting the aghast police who gaze at it unbelievingly, paralysed with shock and fear. Happily, however, Morton has the presence of mind to snatch one of their shotguns, and calmly uses it to blow apart the mega-serpent's head. The police haul Lisa out of the water, sit her down, and wrap a blanket around her to keep her warm – and then the credits roll. The End.
It may not seem so, but the above is actually a highly-condensed retelling of this movie's complex storyline. Even so, it is more than sufficient to reveal that The Bite is both a snake-themed horror movie and a body horror movie. As a zoologist by training and profession, I don't generally have issues with monster-themed horror movies regardless of the animal type or species involved, but I'm not keen on body horror flicks, so there were one or two scenes where I briefly averted my eyes from the screen, as the special effects, even for 1989, were decidedly realistic at times and unequivocally gory, to say the least!
As well they might be, bearing in mind that they had been created by none other than esteemed Japanese sfx artist and film director Joji Tani, better known as Screaming Mad George. His work is renowned for its surreal, gruesome, gross-out visuals, which have appeared in such famous fantasy/sci fi movies as Big Trouble In Little China (now there's a film that I definitely need to rewatch and then review here!), Society (ditto!), Predator, two Nightmare On Elm Street films, and two Re-Animator films, to mention but a few.
Given the truly macabre nature of this present movie's plot, the two leads perform very effectively, especially Peck, who had to deal stoically with all manner of grisly physical effects and prosthetics imposed upon him, particularly in the climactic snake-engendering/chase/transformation scene, because CGI was in its infancy back then.
Incidentally, I noted earlier that this movie's alternative title is Curse II: The Bite, thus intimating that it is a sequel to an earlier movie, presumably entitled The Curse. In fact, such a movie does indeed exist, produced by the same company and released in 1987, as do two further ones, yielding a Curse tetralogy. In reality, however, they are all entirely unrelated to one another, the only reason for the four of them having the Curse moniker is that the first one had proved very successful, so it was hoped that by linking its name to them, the other three would be too, by association.
If you found the notorious 1973 snake/human-transformation creature feature Sssssss too horrifying to stomach (check out my review of it here), or are ophiophobic in general, The Bite is most definitely not for you either! Otherwise, suspend your disbelief from as high a vantage point as possible, and just enjoy the madness!
Moreover, if you would indeed like to do just that, you don't even have to seek out this movie in big box ex-rental video format any more – just click here to watch it for free online and in its entirety on YouTube, or click here if you'd prefer to experience just a sample of this serpent-filled scarefest, by simply watching an official trailer for it instead.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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