Woodyanders
The residents in the tiny remote community of Eden Island find themselves in great jeopardy after a bunch of lethal scientifically enhanced snakes escape from a nearby lab research facility. Director Bill Corcoran, working from a rather trite script by Brian Katkin, relates the familiar and predictable, yet still enjoyable story at a snappy enough pace, draws the main characters with real depth, and delivers plenty of pretty graphic (albeit fairly tacky) gore, but alas fails to generate much in the way of initial suspense and gets bogged down a bit too much in tiresome small town melodrama. Worse yet, the cruddy and unconvincing CGI snakes prove to be utterly laughable instead of scary and threatening. Fortunately, this movie improves as it goes along, with an especially tense and exciting last third complete with some rousing and well staged set pieces. Moreover, the competent acting by the capable cast keeps this picture on track: Tara Reid as the feisty Nicky Swift, Jonathan Scarfe as likable and resourceful ex-Marine Cal Taylor, Stephen E. Miller as the amiable Hank Brownie, Corbin Bernsen as nefarious and duplicitous corporate bigwig Burton, Don S. Davis as the genial Dr. Silverton, and Mark Humphrey as the no-nonsense Sheriff Hendricks. However, Genevieve Buechner seriously grates on the nerves as whiny teenage brat Maggie and Mercedes McNab is wasted in a nothing minor role. Both Thomas Burstyn's crisp cinematography and Lawrence Shragge's lively rattling score are up to par. An acceptable time-waster.
TheLittleSongbird
Vipers was yet another movie that I watched with little else to do, and while I wasn't expecting much other than a cheesy but entertaining movie I wasn't anticipating it to be this bad. The sheer awfulness and artificiality of the special effects were in all honesty scarier than the snakes, who were the anti-thesis of menacing and poorly utilised, and the entire movie even. The editing is choppy at best and the lighting gives the film an overly-drab look. The actors I have seen before, and they are mostly acceptable to good, but here they don't have much to work with(a couple especially even disappear without a trace) and their acting suffers consequently, coming across as bland. Thw script, story and the characters were the biggest let-downs. The script is terrible, very cheesy, stilted and aimless, and the story complete with a lack of suspense, clichéd sub-plots, predictable death scenes and dull pacing left me completely disengaged. Overall, ridiculously awful. 1/10 Bethany Cox
Jackson Booth-Millard
From the short description I read it sounded like some Anaconda rip-off made for TV, it turned out, that is exactly what is was, just with more snakes. Basically a large amount of vipers have been taken by scientists to be experimented on to find a breakthrough, it all goes wrong when some criminals unintentionally break the glass and the snakes escape. At a big meeting, Burton (The Dentist's Corbin Bernsen), who is in charge of the research, explains that these vipers have been genetically enhanced in order to create a cure for breast cancer. Now slithering their way to a near isolated lake town, the residents, including Nicky Swift (American Pie's Tara Reid) who works at the hotel, are unaware of the danger. One or two people fall victim to the terror these venomous mutated creatures bring, but the townspeople are still not sure what is going on, only that some people have snake bites that need antidote injected. Soon enough everyone is on the run from the vipers, trapping themselves in the hotel, and trying to get help or escape the danger. Burton does find out about the snakes escaping from the medical research facility, and he does get in touch with one of the people caught in the chaos, but he dismisses the problem for the benefit of the research. In the end the vipers are all blown up with a combination of light and gas in the hotel, and Burton gets what coming to him too when the meeting people overhear his earlier conversation. Also starring Jonathan Scarfe as Cal Taylor, Genevieve Buechner as Maggie Martin, Stephen E. Miller as Hank Brownie, Jessica Steen as Dr. Collins, Don S. Davis as Dr. Silverton, Mark Humphrey as Sheriff Hendricks, Aaron Pearl as Jack Martin and Claire Rankin as Ellie Martin. It is shame that Reid, one of the fittest of the girls in the great teen sex comedy has gone so downhill, she is rather dull, and Bernsen doesn't do much either, all the other cast members are silly and predictable too. The blood amount is fair, but the special effects involved for making the snakes look deadly and terrifying is just terrible, it isn't scary, it feels like something made for TV, and it is just an overly boring and awful horror thriller. Poor!
dbborroughs
Genetically altered CGI vipers go on the rampage on a small island in this SCIFI original film. The plot has something to do with a cure for cancer in the venom of the snakes and the evil company that tinkered with them to get better results.Scifi has been churning out made for TV horror and scifi flicks for years now and they've become so generic that at least among my friends we describe films as the sort of thing they might run. Vipers is that sort of thing. Its a low brow horror film that gives you exactly what you expect from a film that premiered on SCIFI-and viewed in that vein worth a box of popcorn and a soda.
AD
