It’s a trio of playful flicks in which wildlife goes even wilder. Let’s see how much fun I had with this triple feature.
ONE BIG SNAKE (2025)
My indie fave director Charlie Steeds brings back the campy, hissing snake from Snake Creek! But dammit if the snake isn’t outfanged by the threat of a voodoo man who wants to become one with the snake.
A hot daddy, his wife, and his son head to a house in the woods they just inherited. They immediately find a man squatting inside, which is where the trouble begins.
The squatter has sinister, ritualistic snake plans. There are snake eggs on the property. An exterminator and a couple of redneck handymen come to the house to up the body count.
But hot dad and mom don’t immediately believe their son when he says he saw a giant snake in the woods.
However, the squatter’s evil plot starts to become clear, making him the problem for a majority of the film. The snake just doesn’t get as much attention as it did in Snake Creek. Although, it does eventually multiply.
The final act is when things pick up and we get funny snake attacks and battles, and it’s totally worth the wait.
DROPBEAR (2025)
I expected a lot of silliness from this one, but it went from pretty bad to even worse as it progressed. However, it has great fashion sense.
Believe it or not, apparently there is a real scam tour guides use in Australia concerning the legend of “drop bears”–killer koalas that drop down onto their victims from the trees. That is the basic premise of this one.
The opening kill sets the stage for a fun creature feature.
Then we meet our American tourists, one of whom looks like a Temu Justin Timberlake circa the NSYNC years.
There is way too much time spent on the group setting up camp and sitting around a campfire before the two tour guides that take them into the outback try to pull a drop bear prank on them. However, real drop bears show up! We’re talking 2007 level SyFy CGI killer animal effects. The drop bears’ feet never even touch the ground. Awesome.
This is when I thought the film would take off with loads of campy killer koala action. Instead, the group ends up in some sort of lab bunker and encounter a giant, talking koala/human hybrid in a bad costume.
He explains what human scientists have done to his kind and how they’ve fed off humans ever since. His soliloquy is cheesy and accompanied by flashbacks to how the whole scientific experiment thing went down.
The movie totally falls apart, and for a change, the only good part is when the military shows up, because they have a sizzling hot leader. I mean…because their arrival triggers a stampede of small drop bears. Don’t all small bears want a daddy bear?
The group eventually has to take on the talking koala human, but once the boss battle dust settles, the movie goes on for another ten pointless minutes, and there’s even an unnecessary scene after the credits.
KILLER MOSQUITOS (2018)
This one, which has been retitled Insect on Tubi, is mostly a load of fun. It’s an Italian film, but most of it is in English, with just some occasional Italian speaking characters with no subtitles, so you have to turn them on if you watch it on Tubi. Also, while the film was originally titled Killer Mosquitos, a caretaker refers to them as horseflies. Therefore, I’ll just call them bugs.
The movie opens with maintenance men getting attacked by the bugs, which to me look like mosquitos with an awesome ability to split their faces open to reveal big mouths full of teeth.
Next, we meet a group of friends staying at a villa in the woods. One of the main couples is gay, and the pair doesn’t shy away from hanging all over each other, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.
As the group gets settled into the house, they become concerned because of news reports about a serial killer that has escaped from prison. The killer does indeed make his way to their house, which is when the swarm arrives, making his plot line obsolete mighty fast….
There are entertaining kills along the way, as well as some minor battles with the bugs, but there is a noticeable slowdown in pace halfway through the film as the group tries to figure out how they’re going to safely leave the house.
The highlights for me include the group learning that pot smoke kills the bugs dead, and that there’s a giant queen bug hiding in the house somewhere. However, that’s where the movie kind of blows it. This giant bug should have had its moment to wreak havoc, but we never get that!
Instead, the movie takes some unexpected turns and leaves us on a sort of cliffhanger with the old “to be continued…” as the final frame. Yet it doesn’t appear a sequel ever happened. Argh!
