Sssssss (1973)

Sssssss arrived at a curious moment in horror cinema history, when traditional creature features had largely lost their power to genuinely shock audiences. Decades after King Kong and Godzilla had terrified moviegoers, the monster movie had gradually drifted toward self-parody. By the early 1970s audiences had already endured such unlikely horrors as giant rabbits in Night of the Lepus, killer shrews, and flesh-eating worms in Squirm. The genre was desperately in need of reinvention.

Two years later Steven Spielberg would accomplish exactly that with Jaws, redefining the modern creature feature entirely.

By comparison, films such as Sssssss already felt slightly like relics from another era.

Fortunately, B-monster movies never truly die.

Even today audiences continue embracing giant-animal absurdities, from Anaconda to Cocaine Bear. There is simply something eternal about watching humanity terrorised by oversized wildlife.

Snake movies in particular have enjoyed periodic revivals over the years, though in 1973 filmmakers lacked the luxury of CGI-enhanced reptilian chaos. Sssssss instead proudly advertises during its opening that the cast worked in dangerous proximity to real venomous snakes imported from Thailand and Singapore — a fact intended to reassure audiences that genuine peril lurked behind the scenes.

The film centres around respected herpetologist Dr Karl Stoner, played with eerie calmness by Strother Martin. After the unexplained disappearance of his previous assistant, Stoner recruits a fresh young understudy in the form of Dirk Benedict — years before he found television fame in Battlestar Galactica and The A-Team.

Benedict’s eager young assistant moves into Stoner’s isolated home and laboratory, where he is introduced to an astonishing collection of deadly snakes from around the world. Before beginning work, Stoner injects him with an experimental serum supposedly designed to build immunity against snake venom.

At first, the idea sounds reassuring.

However, Stoner insists that “booster shots” will be necessary for some time — which naturally proves less comforting.

Soon the injections begin taking a visible toll. Benedict experiences disturbing hallucinations, rapid weight loss, peeling skin, and increasingly alarming physical changes. His body appears to be subtly reshaping itself while Stoner calmly dismisses every symptom as a perfectly natural stage in the immunity-building process.

The doctor assures him that eventually even ten black mambas biting simultaneously would pose no threat whatsoever.

One cannot help feeling slightly uneasy at this point.

Meanwhile, awkward questions begin surfacing regarding Tim, Stoner’s mysteriously vanished former assistant. Police investigations suggest Tim never actually reached the uncle Stoner claimed he had gone to visit. Benedict slowly begins suspecting something is terribly wrong — suspicions that intensify dramatically once his skin starts turning green and faint scales begin appearing.

The film’s most memorable sequence arrives when Stoner’s daughter — who has by now developed romantic feelings toward Benedict — visits a carnival while collecting a rare snake specimen in town. Hearing rumours of a grotesque “Snake Man” attraction, she wanders into the sideshow only to discover a hideously mutated reptilian creature crying helplessly for assistance.

To her horror, the monster turns out to be Tim.

Suddenly everything becomes terrifyingly clear.

Her father has not been building immunity to snakes.

He has been transforming human beings into them.

The revelation finally injects the film with genuine momentum as the race begins to save Benedict before he too degenerates fully into a reptilian carnival monstrosity. Meanwhile the police continue edging ever closer toward uncovering Stoner’s experiments and hidden crimes.

The central problem with Sssssss is not that it is incompetent.

Far from it.

The film is actually reasonably well-made, competently acted, and paced well enough to remain watchable throughout. Strother Martin delivers a solid performance as the quietly unhinged scientist, while Dirk Benedict makes for an appealing protagonist.

The difficulty is that the film simply is not frightening.

At all.

For a horror movie about human transformation and deadly snakes, Sssssss often feels strangely closer in tone to a wildlife documentary or a made-for-television science-fiction thriller than genuine horror cinema. There is very little blood, minimal suspense, and almost no real sense of danger or dread.

Even the transformation scenes, while respectable for their era, lack the visceral shock necessary to leave much impact.

To be fair, the makeup effects did receive praise at the time and were by no means embarrassing. Yet unfortunately for Sssssss, it arrived during the exact same period that The Exorcist was redefining audience expectations regarding horror makeup and special effects entirely.

Compared with the demonic intensity and technical brilliance of The Exorcist, films like Sssssss immediately began looking quaint and old-fashioned.

Still, there remains something oddly likable about the film.

Beneath the reptilian mutations and carnival grotesqueries lies a surprisingly melancholy doomed-love-story atmosphere. The relationship between Benedict and Stoner’s daughter gives the film a faint emotional core absent from many comparable creature features of the era.

And while the film may never truly generate fear, it does at least maintain enough curiosity and sincerity to remain reasonably engaging throughout.

Interestingly enough, the film was produced by the legendary team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown — the very same duo who would shortly afterward produce Jaws and laugh all the way to the bank.

Compared to the revolutionary terror of Spielberg’s shark masterpiece, Sssssss now feels decidedly tame:
a mildly enjoyable,
slightly old-fashioned,
and ultimately harmless little slice of 1970s creature-feature nostalgia.

Not especially scary.

But perfectly watchable if approached as a quirky science-fiction love story involving snakes rather than a serious horror film.