Summary
Snake Outta Compton is a creature-feature parody film that ends up being a complete mess.
Snake Outta Compton is a comedy horror from director Hank Braxtan (Unnatural) and stars Ricky Flowers Jr (Show Me Your Glory: The Movie), Motown Maurice and Aurelia Michael.
Snake Outta Compton follows a rap group known as “Cam’s Crew”, which includes Cam (Flowers Jr), Pinball (Maurice), Neon (Michael) and Beez Neez (Dospil), who are about to get their big record audition only for their housemate, Vurkel (Essein), to experiment on a snake, causing it to grow supersize and cause chaos in Compton. The different sides must come together to defeat the snake, which is attracted to music being played at the recording studio.
Snake Outta Compton has a story that plays out like a creature feature, which is the only redeeming factor in this whole film. The idea that snake is getting bigger and is causing larger body counts is the 101 of creature features. The problems here come from the fact that this is a parody film, which sees the story taking the piss out of hugely popular films including Straight Outta Compton, Training Day and even Speed, just to mention a few. The parody side of the film fits in line with the likes of classically-hated movies including Disaster Movie, Epic Movie and Date Movie, giving the story an insulting side which it struggles to recover from. If we can somehow ignore the parody side of everything this is a simple outline of a story which does fit the creature feature genre of filmmaking.
Snake Outta Compton has performances from Ricky Flowers Jr as the leader of the group, Motown Maurice as the dumb figure, Aurelia Michael as the strong lead singer of the crew, Joston Theney playing an over the top version of Denzel Washington, Jon Kondelik being an Ethan Hawke and Donte Essien being the nerdy figure called Vurkel, which is clearly meant to be Urkel from the 80s sitcom. It is always going to be hard to truly judge any of these actors on their abilities because this film doesn’t rely on comic timing, emotional range or any of the standard measurement tools. It would be unfair to just slam the cast because most of them are only just stepping into the film world and everyone is allowed a dud, right? I do feel most of the cast do the best they can with the material given to them.
Snake Outta Compton is a horror comedy that uses the creature feature elements for horror, which while low budget do work on the basic levels. We have blood-splattered kills and a threat which isn’t just going to go away. The special effects on the creature are yet another talking point, because this studio does make low budget ones that can be fun, like Big Ass Spider. But this one doesn’t click. The comedy is what leads things most downhill; as I said this is a parody-based film, and as such relies on you to know the source of the parody, which can be a problem because the strongest parody films are usually modern movies. There was one moment I did laugh out loud, which involved a character just saying the word “nope”, as this summed up most of my feelings for this movie.
Overall this is a parody film that gets caught in the middle of trying to decide if it wants to be a parody or a creature feature, and falls flat on its face doing so.
