MORE SNAKES • Snakes video and more • Sam Jackson feature • Movie Title Match Game

You see the Dr. Seussian title. You get the gist. But what could have been just a well-named shlocky mess is instead everything a summer action movie should be. Just when you settle into laughing at the purposefully stock characters and snappy one-liners (“I'm tired of these muthaf**ckin' snakes on this muthaf**ckin' plane!”), Snakes on a Plane manages to scare the hell out of you. As the deranged crime boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) says, “Woo!”

This exercise in organic terrorism begins when a hapless surfer dude (Nathan Phillips) witnesses a murder in Hawaii, and FBI agent Nelville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson, who like Bruce Willis in the Die-Hard days, is the man you can trust in a crazy simple setup like this) must fly him to Los Angeles to testify. Whereas every other airplane-disaster flick would plant a bomb (cf. everything from Airport 1975 to Red-Eye), SOAP's bad guy knows this is a post-9/11 world, baby. Time to think outside the box. Hence, he stows hundreds (thousands?) of poisonous cobras, rattlesnakes, and diamondbacks on the flight, figuring that if the venom doesn't get the witness, the snakes—hopped up on pheromones—will probably bring the plane down by, oh, screwing up the machinery or killing the pilot or something. And don't call me Shirley.

This melange of airplane-disaster genre conventions has been assembled by screenwriters John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez and director David R. Ellis into something that equals more than the sum of its parts. Putting aside the odd product placement—Red Bull anyone?—and the hokey slither-vision, the cast of one-dimensional characters (the gay flight attendant, the crying baby, the horny young folk) led by perennial badass Samuel L. helps to morph SOAP into something else. Snakesploitation? Love it.

Possible spoilers ahead! The onboard fun kicks off when the snakes attack like they're on a personal vendetta against the seven deadly sins. A pair of telegenic hotties attempt to join the mile-high club and get impromptu living nipple clamps instead. A vain guy who can't stop looking in the mirror while he pees suffers the most unkind bite of all. A drunk fat chick buys the big one too. But the movie hits its stride as all remaining passengers and crew retreat and attempt a Tazer and fire-extinquisher wielding stand-off behind a luggage barricade. Meal carts become missiles, and endlessly quotable dialogue is fired off (“Fu**in' snakes! Get off my dick!”).

Why is this movie so watchable? Four simple reasons. It's truly funny. It's truly scary. It's truly gruesome. And Samuel L. Jackson is the cool head who prevails (“You stick with me, you live”). If the film overcomes the buzz backlash that's been building for months and does well at the box office, get ready for the onslaught of concisely titled knock-offs as Hollywood begins a game of action-movie Mad-Libs. In the meantime, stick with this one.

—Jessica Letkemann