A Snake Bitten Sequel That Barely Slithers
In the hazy era of late-80s VHS horror, a time when rubber monsters and low-light backdrops ruled the shelves of Mom-and-Pop video stores, Curse II: The Bite emerged as a sequel in name only to David Keith’s The Curse (1987). But make no mistake: while The Curse had some semblance of Lovecraftian dread, Curse II drops all pretense of cosmic horror and instead delivers a mutant snake man movie that feels like it was stitched together from discarded ideas and leftover rubber latex.
Directed by Frederico Prosperi (under the pseudonym Fred Goodwin), a former collaborator with Italian exploitation maestro Lucio Fulci, Curse II is a bizarre, often incoherent journey into the New Mexico desert, where radiation, snakes, and poor dialogue compete to see which will wear down your patience first. But amid the molasses-slow pacing, cartoonish gore, and shoddy writing, one thing becomes painfully clear: the only thing worth watching here is Jill Schoelen. And even she looks like she’s wondering what she’s doing in this movie.
Plot Poison
The premise, such as it is, kicks off with a young couple, Clark (played by J. Eddie Peck) and Lisa (Jill Schoelen), driving cross-country through a deserted stretch of American Southwest. Clark is handsome, boring, and wooden—the cinematic equivalent of beige carpeting. Lisa, on the other hand, is feisty and full of life, managing to breathe some humanity into scenes that would otherwise collapse under the weight of their own tedium.
The couple’s journey takes a wrong turn—literally—when they end up driving through a restricted nuclear testing area crawling with venomous snakes. Clark, in a moment of Darwin Award brilliance, gets bitten by a particularly nasty viper. But this isn’t any ordinary rattler; it’s been mutated by radiation, and soon enough, Clark begins to undergo a transformation that’s part The Fly, part Toxic Avenger, and all cheap prosthetics.
What follows is a slow and painful mutation that sees Clark’s hand (and eventually other body parts) turn into a hideous snake appendage. He becomes increasingly violent and unstable, and Lisa is left to deal with the horror of watching her boyfriend literally fall apart.
That might sound like fertile ground for Cronenbergian body horror or a tragic descent into madness. Instead, Curse IIplays like a SyFy Channel original movie made ten years before SyFy Channel even existed—long stretches of nothing punctuated by brief moments of creature effects that might’ve looked better in a dimly-lit funhouse.
Snake Oil Production
Let’s talk about the effects, since that’s clearly where the budget went. Screaming Mad George—yes, the effects maestro behind Society and Bride of Re-Animator—was brought in to create the film’s grotesque creature work. And to his credit, the body horror elements are the only technically interesting thing here. When Clark’s hand sloughs off in gooey chunks, revealing writhing tendrils of snakelike flesh underneath, it’s the rare moment the film actually feels alive.
But these moments are few and far between. The pacing is glacial. Clark’s transformation takes forever, and unlike The Fly or even Pumpkinhead, there’s no emotional arc to the mutation. There’s no soul to lose, no humanity to mourn. Clark starts out flat and becomes a monster who’s even flatter. The filmmakers seem to assume that watching rubber things squirm on screen is enough to carry a movie. Spoiler: it’s not.
And when we finally get a full-on creature reveal—Clark’s head fully transformed into a snake monstrosity—it’s equal parts laughable and fascinating, like watching a high school shop project brought to life in stop motion. The finale is a parade of nonsense, culminating in a shootout in an abandoned building with snake-Clark hissing and striking like a giant puppet who just wants the scene to be over.
Jill Schoelen Deserved Better
The lone bright spot in this rotting cornucopia of desert grime and snake spit is Jill Schoelen. By the time Curse II was released, Schoelen had already made a name for herself in cult horror circles with performances in The Stepfather, Cutting Class, and Phantom of the Opera. Here, she brings charm and nuance to a role that frankly doesn’t deserve it.
Her Lisa is the emotional center of the film, even though the script gives her little to work with beyond reaction shots and a few screaming fits. Still, Schoelen manages to ground the film in something resembling human experience. Her expressions convey real concern and fear, and she doesn’t phone it in even when surrounded by squirming prosthetics and a love interest who’s acting like he’s reading cue cards behind the camera.
There’s a genuine moment midway through where Lisa realizes something is deeply wrong with Clark. Her subtle mix of fear, denial, and loyalty gives the scene emotional weight. It’s one of the only times the movie connects on anything other than a reptilian level. If Curse II had spent more time developing her character—or better yet, made her the one who transforms—it might’ve had something going for it.
Supporting Cast of Nobodies and Has-Beens
Other than Schoelen, the cast is forgettable. J. Eddie Peck is a black hole of charisma, a one-man void of energy whose descent into monsterhood is as compelling as a DMV line. Bo Svenson pops in as a herpetologist who seems to be in a different movie entirely. His scenes feel like they were filmed in a single afternoon, possibly while he was half-asleep or drunk. He plays Dr. Jenkins, a snake expert whose job is to explain the mutation science with all the conviction of a man reading aloud from a cereal box.
Jamie Farr—yes, MASH*’s own Klinger—shows up in a bizarre cameo as a traveling salesman who runs a roadside snake zoo. His scene is tonally off, cartoonish, and completely unnecessary, serving no function except to remind viewers that they could be watching literally anything else. He gets a moment of gory comeuppance that feels tacked on for shock value, as if someone realized the script didn’t have enough action and decided to sacrifice a sitcom star for laughs.
An Italian-American Mishmash
Despite being marketed as an American horror film, Curse II is essentially an Italian production hiding under a cowboy hat. Produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis—who previously gave us Beyond the Door and Tentacles—the film bears all the marks of late-era Italian exploitation: awkward dubbing, confusing narrative threads, abrupt tonal shifts, and a strange detachment from anything resembling normal human behavior.
The cinematography is decent at times, capturing the desolation of the desert in wide shots that might have impressed if they weren’t interrupted every five minutes by rubber snakes being thrown at the camera. The score, composed by Carlo Maria Cordio, is an uninspired synth mush that sounds like off-brand John Carpenter filtered through a Casio keyboard.
A Legacy of Forgettable Sequels
Calling Curse II a sequel is a stretch. It has no narrative connection to The Curse, and future entries (Curse III: Blood Sacrifice and Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice) were also standalone stories awkwardly retrofitted into a “franchise.” This was a common practice at the time—branding a horror film as part of a series to boost rental sales. In the case of Curse II, it’s not only misleading, it’s a disservice to anyone hoping for continuity or thematic cohesion.
Instead, the film stumbles through its 97-minute runtime like a wounded animal, occasionally baring its fangs with some decent creature effects, only to curl up and wheeze through scenes that feel like deleted footage from Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Final Verdict: A Molting Mess
Curse II: The Bite is a film that fails to capitalize on its few strengths. Screaming Mad George’s makeup work is intermittently effective, and Jill Schoelen gives a performance that belongs in a much better movie. But everything else—from the wooden acting to the limp direction, from the nonsensical pacing to the tonal whiplash—sinks the film into the quicksand of straight-to-video obscurity.
For 1989, it might have squeaked by as late-night cable filler, the kind of thing you watch half-asleep at 2 a.m. with one eye open. But rewatching it today only confirms what many suspected all along: this is horror with no bite.
Rating: 4 out of 10
(Two points for Jill Schoelen, one for the gooey creature effects, and one for the courage to include Jamie Farr. Everything else? Venomous garbage.)
