Slither! Matty gets to grips with a truly wild and wacky horror flick.  

Like production mate Beyond the Door III (1989), CURSE II: THE BITE (1989) began as a standalone project (‘The Reptile Man’) before it was retitled by distributor Trans World Entertainment in order to capitalise on producer Ovidio G. Assonitis’ previous hits. Assonitis’ original Beyond the Door (1974) had been a massive success for Film Ventures (an outfit with close ties to Trans World), and the first Curse (1987) was proving a tidy earner on tape — to the point where TWE, who bankrolled the film, kept the franchise going after Curse II through their successor company, Epic, by acquiring another two unrelated flicks, the Assonitis-less ‘Panga’ (1991) and Catacombs (1988), and releasing them as Curse III: Blood Sacrifice and ‘Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice’ [1]. 

As with Beyond the Door III, Curse II is another odyssey. Here, though, the trek nudging the narrative forward isn’t a literal train journey to hell, but a joyride of mental disintegration and physical transformation. A body horror road movie — part Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), part The Fly (1986) — Curse II is typified by its air of seductive weirdness. The film lives up to its strange and unusual premise. To wit: 

While traversing New Mexico with his gorgeous, plucky girlfriend, Lisa (scream queen Jill Schoelen), Clark (soap regular J. Eddie Peck) is bitten by a radioactive snake which causes his hand to morph into a hungry serpentine creature.

Thematically and structurally similar to Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire classic Near Dark (1987), Curse II concerns itself with the same notions of metamorphosis and denying one’s appetites, and offers an equally eccentric view of the people who populate the highways and byways of the American Southwest. Indeed, despite Italian helmer Federico Prosperi [2] dropping a clanger with some skew-whiff pacing, the subversive touches he weaves into supporting roles that seem trite on paper — a Jewish quack (M*A*S*H star Jamie Farr); a redneck sheriff (Bo Svenson, who’d resurface in Beyond the Door III); a family of pious Amish types; an assortment of truckers — exude a Lynchian flair for evocative characterisation which atones for the speech-bubble dialogue.

An aesthetically striking picture, Curse II’s crisp photography boasts a leering, suitably predatory quality. Each shot seems composed from a snake’s eye view. Laden with memorable images and bristling with an eerie sense of place augmented by the hypnotic sparsity of several key locations, the film’s conclusion ranks among ‘80s horror’s most brilliant and barmy. Spoilers be damned: as his frequent collaborator, Brian Yuzna, once said, the stunningly rubbery FX of Screaming Mad George (Society (1989), Bride of Re-Animator (1990) – both of which also house all-timer finales) might be more impressive conceptually than they are in execution. But Clark slithering around a rain-soaked building site at the mercy of his monster-mit, vomiting all manner of snakes and gunk onto Lisa, has to be seen to be believed. Incidentally, Schoelen was apparently unaware that the reptiles dumped on her were, in fact, real.

Curse II landed on cassette in the U.S. courtesy of Trans World’s home video wing on 27th June 1989, right in the middle of what Seattle Times pundit John Hartl called “sequel summer at the video store” (movies released on VHS either side of Curse II: Saturday the 14th Strikes Back (1988), Food of the Gods II (1989), The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II (1988), and Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls (1989)) [3]. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Trans World planned to mail live snakes to distros as a promotional campaign [4]. Whether they did or not can’t be corroborated.

The film arrived in U.K. stores in summer 1990 via Entertainment in Video as ‘The Bite’.

[1] Other films Epic renamed to sequelise properties they owned include the infamous Troll 2 (1990) (nee ‘Goblins’), and Contamination .7 (1990) and Quest For the Mighty Sword (1990) which were touted as ‘Troll III’ in certain territories. The latter being labelled thus is especially funny, what with it being an actual sequel to something else: Quest For the Mighty Sword is the fourth instalment in the Ator (1982) series.
[2] Little is known about the mysterious Prosperi. Anglicised as ‘Fred Goodwin’ on the final version of Curse II, several hard to verify sources cite Prosperi as the younger brother of journalist turned mondo innovator Franco E. Prosperi, the co-director of Mondo Cane (1962) and Africa Addio (1966). But with his only other credit being a producer post on Franco’s sole dramatic work, Wild Beasts (1982), I’ve always reckoned that Federico is, in fact, Franco himself.
[3] It’s Sequel Summer at Video Stores by John Hartl, Seattle Times, 30th June 1989.
[4] Video: Snakes Alive, Anchorage Daily News, 15th May 1989.