Per Myrhill At first I thought that this would be a really bad movie. I tend to ignore what other people have to say. After this one I'll be more careful on how I choose to spend my time. I hope that this review will spare others from this movie.It's just not bad, it is REALLY bad. After the buildup in the first scene, who had all good ingredients to be something good it derailed totally.I lost interest when they used the disgustingly old cliché that coroners is eating their lunch over dead bodies in the morgue. Not that I find it disgusting to eat in the presence of dead bodies. I just find the cliché itself, old, tired and boring.Coroners have access to proper canteens. I have visited a real morgue in my line of work. I never saw as much as a piece of fruit in the autopsy room.Back to this catastrophe of a movie. Somehow Satan have spawned into our world as a snake. The snake keeps biting, as snakes tend to do, its way to some random small town in, yes once again, America, where a priest who's ancestors was cursed by druids battles the snake.One could possible find some symbolic values but this movie should be forgotten and I hope I can spare you from wasting your time on this.The only thing worth mentioning is a young Christina Applegates appearance.

Chase_Witherspoon A giant king cobra escapes from a freight train, to stage a biblical war against a town priest (Weaver) whose faith is waning. Numerous deaths occur leading Father Farrow to the conclusion that it is Satan himself, incarnate as the biblical serpent of evil, sent from hell to bring about damnation to human kind. Or, as herpetologist Jon Korkes prefers, "it's just a big snake". Contaminating the plot, is a much anticipated opening of a local dog track that a local businessman – supported by the morally corrupt mayor of course – is determined to see through at any cost. End result, while the punters might have missed an opportunity to flush their hard earned, they are, on the other hand, spared a holy war of biblical proportions thanks to the renewed faith Weaver finds, just in time to save his soul.Technically well constructed, with performances of conviction, and generally well paced, there's nothing ostensibly wrong with this mild shocker – even the make-up effects are generally better than most films of the snake ilk. The church organ inspired score can be irritating at times, and some of the supporting cast rank amateurs, but generally speaking, it's not unlikeable for the first 85 minutes.Disappointingly however, the film peters to the climax and instead of some "Exorcist" or "Omen" style epic fire and brimstone, we're treated to an alter ritual in the catacombs, where "Satan" has abducted the good Dr. Sheridan (Gretchen Corbett) and is holding her captive in wait for the man of the cloth. Add in a couple of conversions to the deal, and what we've got here, is surely a miracle.That's Christina Applegate as the token child victim, while veteran actor/producer Norman Lloyd looks as confused as the audience, trying to explain how Fr Farrow's bloodline is the cause of Satan's return, every three generations (or something like that). So, while not without some justifiable criticisms, this isn't that bad and certainly not the stinker that kept it in the tin for three years, before it was finally released in 1982. If the distributors were hoping for maturity in that time, alas, it didn't quite happen, but still worth a look.

zardoz-13 The best thing about "Jaws of Satan" aka "King Cobra" are the snakes. This bottom of the barrel horror movie grafts together the plot from "Jaws" and "The Exorcist." Satan slithers into a rural Alabama town where a race dog track is going to open and starts killing the residents. Seems that the hooded cobra has eyes for Fritz Weaver's doubting Catholic priest. Gretchen Corbett plays a m.d. who wants to get to the bottom of the mystery. Veteran character actor Norman Lloyd has a brief role as an older priest. This movie flopped big-time, and like somebody else said here, the director Bob Claver made this his only theatrical film. Not bad enough to be funny, just bad enough to be bad. When I was a TV news reporter working in Columbus, Mississippi, I got to interview Weaver and a couple of the crew while they were making this dogie across the line in Eutaw, Alabama. As a matter of fact, Eutaw had had a dog racing track. Most of the film was shot on location, too, and that antebellum house is the real deal. What I most remember about reporting on this movie was the snakes. They used real snakes and they didn't put Plexiglas between the actors and the snakes, because the snake wrangler somehow convinced them not to worry. Anyway, a real stinker. Again, like somebody else said, the rattlesnake in the bathtub was a letdown scene. All the shots of the snakes still look great, especially the king cobra's close-up. Talk about a snake-bit movie.

Robert J. Maxwell SPOILERS.I don't really know how it's possible to "spoil" this movie or two give two figs about it.Let me see. The plot. Okay. A rash of odd and lethal snakebites begins turning up in a small town, much to the puzzlement of the doctor played by Gretchen Corbett, looking mighty slim and much cuter than my doctor. Nobody else seems particularly bothered though, despite the fact that all the deciduous trees are bare and all good snakes should be comfortably hibernating. Never mind, though. The priest (Fritz Weaver) is losing his faith or his confidence or something. He boozes it up and doesn't seem to be having a lot of fun. No joke to be unpopular in a small town. Maybe it's partly because, although he seems to be Catholic in that he lapses into Latin at a critical point, he says the mass facing in the wrong direction. At any rate his ontological Angst seems to have drawn Satan to his little town, with Weaver as the bullseye. The original snake, a cobra, arrives by train. (Don't ask.)That's the Exorcist part of it. The Jaws part has to do with one of those money-mongering venture capitalists who wants to open a dog-racing track and doesn't want to alarm any visitors with all this talk about crazy snakes. How dumb can you get? He could have solved the entire problem simply by opening a mongoose-racing track.Oh, there's one of those expert academicians drawn in from the outside to provide us with herpetological knowledge that the other characters (and the audience) don't have. He really doesn't add much, in the way of herpetological expertise, plot development, or character. He's only needed once, to rush in and save Corbett from a beautiful specimen of the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus adamanteus. I know. The snake seems to have changed from a cobra to a rattlesnake. This happens to be a rather wise rattlesnake, having followed Corbett into the shower and peeked at her, but it's a rattlesnake nonetheless. But then there are a LOT of different kinds of snakes used here. The, um, "king cobra" seems to have roused all of them. I spotted a common and harmless gopher snake among the mess. The herpetologist's curiosity isn't aroused by the presence of cobras, native to Asia and Africa, in a small American town, or what an Eastern diamondback is doing so far out of its range in the southeast US. At least one of the snakes is visibly killed on camera, which is pretty rotten if you ask me. The target should have been the screenwriters.But the plot is so full of holes that it's not really worth going into. Speaking of holes, the cobra accosts the priest in a graveyard and while he's trying to run away he falls into an empty freshly dug grave and can't get out. The cobra, it seems, has this thing about crucifixes. What would have happened to Weaver if he'd been a rabbi and pulled a Mogen David we can only speculate about. At one point, Corbett, wearing a neat red dress, is lying down in a cave full of snakes presided over by the Satanic Elapid. I don't know how she wound up on this rock altar. It's done offscreen. The priest shows up, waving his cross, removes the supine Corbett, which is a pity because she really looked very sacrificial, lies down in her place wearing a surplice, kisses his cross, encants some Latin mumbo jumbo, and the snake disappears in a pillar of flame. If he'd have done that at the beginning he could have saved all of us an hour. Oh, by the way, the little girl -- there always has to be a kid to naive to recognize danger signals -- is played by Christina Applegate.