Ah yes, The Snake Man—or as it’s sometimes known in various translations, The Snake King’s Wife, That One Movie Where the Snake Gets Lucky, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reptilian Romance. This 1970 Cambodian mythological fever dream is a cinematic casserole of snake sex, soap opera hysterics, and enough moral whiplash to leave your brain writhing like a cobra in a blender. Hailed as a “Khmer classic,” this is Southeast Asia’s answer to Days of Our Lives, if it were written by a drunken oracle with a venom fetish.
Plot: Slithering Toward Nonsense
Imagine Romeo and Juliet if Romeo was a serpent, Juliet was really gullible, and the whole story was dictated by a hallucinogenic shaman during a snake-handling church revival. That’s The Snake Man in a coconut shell.
Neang Ni is a sweet, hardworking Cambodian woman who one day accidentally unearths a talking snake while digging in her backyard—because of course she does. This snake, claiming to be the “Snake King,” doesn’t hiss or bite. No, he negotiates. He offers food security in exchange for, well, “laying pipe” in the most literal, slithery way possible. Ni agrees, apparently having skipped all chapters of Stranger Danger 101.
Her husband Minob returns from work only to find out his wife has been biblically acquainted with a reptile and is now pregnant. Understandably upset but wildly over-the-top, he kills the Snake King, cooks him up, and feeds him to his wife. Yes—he snakeburgers the father of her unborn spawn.
And if you thought that was rock bottom, just wait. When she finds out she ate her cold-blooded baby daddy, Ni gets murdered by her husband mid-bath like this is a scaly Psycho remake. As her snake-children slither out of her womb (just another Tuesday in Cambodian folklore), all are stomped to death—except one, who escapes, gets adopted by a hermit, and is turned into a dreamy man named Veasna because magic is lazy like that.
Years pass, and Veasna falls in love with a rich girl. But her stepmother—who’s both horny and evil (what a combo!)—wants him too. This leads to curses, betrayals, snake transformations, hair made of live serpents, cannibalistic insanity, and a witch who’s just a floating head with intestines. Yes, that’s the real boss fight. Disney, eat your heart out.
Eventually, the cursed child burns the witch’s possessions and her disgusting guts-on-the-go body, which somehow restores everyone’s sanity, limbs, hair, and family values. Cue the cheesy freeze-frame ending and everyone living happily ever after in a big house they presumably inherited from the Snake King’s real estate holdings.
Acting: Hiss-terical Melodrama
Dy Saveth, Cambodia’s most celebrated actress at the time, gives it her all—though it must be hard to summon Oscar-caliber gravitas when your scene partner is a rubber python dangling from a fishing line. Chea Yuthorn as Veasna is handsome in a “will this guy suddenly molt?” kind of way, and he does fine considering half his role involves pretending to turn back into a boa constrictor mid-sentence.
The rest of the cast lean into the hysteria like they’re auditioning for a telenovela directed by H.P. Lovecraft. At any given moment, someone is crying, screaming, transforming into an animal, or eating uncooked meat like it’s Girl Dinner in Hell. It’s hard to judge whether the performances are good or bad—because once a floating witch head shows up, you stop applying Earth logic.
Special Effects: Ramen Noodles and Fever Dreams
The effects in The Snake Man are… ambitious. There’s some charming retro flair, like the use of puppet snakes that appear to be borrowed from a secondhand carnival. The transformation sequences, where people become snakes or snake-haired Medusa-children, resemble bad Instagram filters gone sentient.
And then there’s the witch. A floating head with intestines dangling like cursed spaghetti. It’s horrifying in the way that low-res YouTube videos from 2007 were horrifying—not because they’re good, but because your brain keeps whispering, “Why does this exist?”
Production Value: Snakes on a Budget
Shot partially at Cinecittà and on location in Egypt—because nothing says authentic Cambodian mythology like Mediterranean production values—the film has a strangely dislocated sense of place. You can’t tell if the house is in ancient Angkor or a modern haunted cul-de-sac. The lighting is soft and smeared, the audio seems dubbed by people watching a different movie, and some scenes appear to have been filmed during a power outage with a flashlight and blind faith.
The music? Mostly dramatic stings that sound like someone smashing a xylophone while a cobra plays the bongos.
Awards and Legacy: Wait, This Won Things?
Surprisingly, The Snake Man was a huge hit. It won six Golden Awards at the 19th Asian Movie Awards in Singapore, including Best Director and Best Actress. That’s not sarcasm. That’s real. The film was enormous in Cambodia and neighboring Thailand—probably because if you’ve had to sit through a thousand hours of French colonialist dramas, a movie where a snake king seduces a peasant woman and is reborn as a hot guy is basically Avengers: Endgame.
And yes, it’s a “Khmer classic.” But classics aren’t always good. Sometimes, they’re just too weird and wild to forget—like a fever dream you half-remember after eating expired sushi.
Final Verdict: Snakebitten Madness
The Snake Man is an utterly bonkers movie that defies conventional criticism. It’s not “so bad it’s good.” It’s more like “so weird you can’t look away.” It’s like someone made a Cambodian version of Eraserhead but filled it with sexy reptiles, jealous stepmothers, meat-blood diets, and floating gut monsters.
If that sounds like your thing, godspeed. But for everyone else, it’s a hard pass—with a side of cobra curry and a psychic exorcism.
Final Rating: 1.5 out of 5 sentient intestines
Because sometimes, it’s better to just keep the shovel in the shed and not dig up ancient talking snakes.
