Rattled (1996) (TV) Directed by Tony Randel

(Review originally written at 26 July 2008)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

You could call this movie "Arachnophobia" only with, well, snakes. It has a comparable story and even some of the characters shows similarities. "Arachnophobia" is still a more entertaining movie though, while "Rattled" also isn't too bad on its own. It chooses a more serious approach but not without being entertaining.

Quite amazing that a movie with such a concept still picks a serious approach. Nevertheless it works out better than you would expect. While "Rattled" isn't exactly an exciting or scary movie to watch it's still an effective one. Maybe it would had been better still if it had picked a more B-movie, over-the-top, type of approach but this also didn't really worked out well for "Eight Legged Freaks", so well who knows, maybe this was still the best possible approach to go with in the long run.

It's of course a fairly predictable movie, that because of that, also doesn't ever become an engaging or thrilling one. The characters also aren't interesting enough for that and at times the movie even feels more like a soap-opera than a real horror flick.

Also quite disappointing that the snakes get to do so little interesting. Or at least I expected an higher body-count. Only poor Clint Howard gets killed, after he has been in the movie for about 2 minutes. The snakes do attack but they could had given the movie a bigger sense of danger and more horror like if more characters got killed off and also in some more gruesome ways.

The movie now remains fairly light and tame to watch, which is also understandable, considering that this is a made for TV movie. In that regard of being a made for TV movie, this is still a rather good one and well made one. It's definitely better than you would expect in advance for it to be and the concept works out better than it looks like on paper.

6/10