Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

On the Caribbean island of Korbai, the natives perform animal and human sacrifices under the mysterious voodoo priest, Damballah. When a new law-enforcement official, Captain Labesch (Rafael Bertrand), arrives, he is outraged that the police have turned a blind eye to the cult's murderous ways. Determined to bring about law and order, Labesch seeks the aid of Carl Van Molder (Boris Karloff), a wealthy and powerful landowner who advises the captain against interfering with native customs. When he ignores Van Molder's advice, policemen start turning up dead, killed by female zombies under the command of the sultry priestess Kalia (Tongolele) and a grinning, maniacal dwarf (Santonon) in sunglasses. There's also a romantic sub-plot involving Labesch's assistant, Lt. Wilhelm (Carlos East), and Van Molder's visiting niece, Annabella (Julissa), who is a proud member of the Anti-Saloon League.Karloff looks like death warmed over but is reasonably effective as the oily Van Molder. Tongolele drips with diabolical sensuality as the snake-handling voodoo priestess; the close-ups of her eyes are particularly stunning. The highly attractive Julissa is less than believable as the chaste and tee-totaling Annabella; her most effective scene is a fevered-dream sequence in which Annabella has lesbian sex with her doppelganger. Rafael Bernard chews the scenery as the self-righteous, tunnel-visioned Captain Labesch. Carlos East is barely there as the handsome, if hard-drinking, Lt. Wilhelm.The most striking performance is the dwarf Santonon's. Whether flogging an errant zombie, laughing insanely as he beheads a chicken, helping Kalia perform a ritual to manipulate Annabella's dreams, or bleeding to death after he is repeatedly slashed with a machete, Santonon fully owns each of his scenes. I can't say that his performance is good, but it damned sure stayed with me!SNAKE PEOPLE is by no means a great horror film, but I found it entertaining—even if it didn't take me long to figure out who Damballah was; even if the horrible dialogue sounds even worse when dubbed from Spanish to English; and even if the ending was too damned abrupt. The best scenes are mainly of the snake-dancers and the voodoo rituals.My favorite line of dialogue, courtesy of Annabella: "Modern science has proved that alcohol is responsible for 99.2% of all the world's sins!" (Yeah, the same way it proved that vaccines are responsible for autism.)

First off, if you've come here as a Karloff fan, the film is on Youtube.com and it seems like a decent print. The same media channel on Youtube has put out tons of other B movies there as well, they probably also released them on DVD, so you can check it out there for free.I don't know why so many are so critical of this film, it looks above average to me in terms of late 60's early 70's drive in horror movies. If you want to compare it to something done by an HBO now (like that Vampire series), yeah it sucks probably, but among it's peers, it's above average. Many say this movie is slow moving, but I mean the first scene has a real animal sacrifice (a chicken) and the newly risen zombie woman is made a sex slave! That's some pretty racy stuff for me! The movie was not slow to me, but it was hard to root for the Hero, or even know who the Hero was until about the end, I got the feeling that the Zombie cult was the Hero, lol.It does rap up abruptly but thankfully painlessly and I liked it. Many reviewers were turned on by the middle aged cultess, I was not but she did freak me out with those eye close ups. The black zombie chicks turned me on with their pretty faces and hot lips. If you are into chicks dancing with snakes, you will like this movie. And if you get down to it, there were not many movies up to that time that featured chicks with snakes like this one did, this movie was pushing boundaries if you ask me.Karloff's disappearance at the last part is sad, and he's not the sole reason to watch, the voodoo rituals take that honor; but he does have a couple of decent dialog scenes I guess and the movie is better off with him in it then without.Compared to other crappy horror movies of it's time this rates a 7 of 10 from me, it would have rated higher with some heavy doses of nudity (there is none). Worth watching on Youtube.

What a waste of perfectly good celluloid. There are times when I thought this was a comedy. The dwarf's scenes are really campy. I wish he had had a little more to do. Visually, it's a whole lot of silly images going nowhere. The girl is pretty in a sort of maternal way. The natives are attractive and dance well. Voodoo people are very hard on chickens, always have been. Other than finding out what is going on, we aren't very privy to what is going on. Once the young woman arrives, we know that if there is going to be a sacrifice, she's going to be it. She is disappointing in that she comes on so strong at the beginning and then lets go of her whole temperance thing. We have the buffoonish police captain whom no one takes seriously. Anyway, there are some cool snakes, a few dances, some drums. Instead of this, watch some of those old Lugosi movies and their ilk. They really created the zombie which we have grown to love.

The film is almost worth it for one scene: A dead woman is to be made a zombie; the ritual goes like this: a dwarf in sunglasses and love-beads, top-hat and tux (over a tie-dye tee-shirt) whips the back of a native girl kneeling before him. She gets sexually excited (although fully dressed) and has orgasm. Then a goat is brought in. The dwarf licks the whip he has been using to beat the girl, and then he takes a tuft of goat hair and licks that. A white guy kisses the dead woman, who comes to "life". Later we find that the girl who has been whipped to death has died as a human sacrifice, although it's not clear how, since the blood on her dead face has nothing to do with the whipping. Maybe it was just the ecstasy, it was too much for her.Oh, Boris Karloff is said to star in this film I think he's on about five minutes of film here, but I may be overestimating; there's also a Karloff stand-in who's too tall, too thin, and otherwise doesn't look anything like him.The rest of the film just sucks.