Black Snake Moan

2006 drama

Rating: 8/20

Plot: A mentally-challenged whore and her mentally-challenged former-boy-band-member boyfriend make whoopee. The boyfriend immediately needs to vomit in a toilet; the whore's leg starts itching and she begins hearing things--somebody wildly playing the maracas, a train, crickets. The boyfriend white snake grunts and then runs off to join the army, only to return about a week later because he had to vomit too often. She sleeps with a round man and then goes to a party where she swallows about twenty-seven different types of pills and drinks a lot. The night ends with her boyfriend's shady best friend punching her several times and throwing her out the side door of his pickup truck. Samuel L. Jackson wakes up the next morning, black snake moans, and finds the whore and her magical underpants that never get dirty sprawled out on the road. He ends up chaining her to a radiator and making her listen to his terrible blues music. A couple days or a few weeks or a month or so pass and everybody lives happily ever after. Or they die. Either way, nobody really cares.

This goes for gritty but succeeds in only being really silly. The acting is bad, the script predictable, the story Hollywood. It's hard to believe that a movie that features Christini Ricci chained to a radiator in her underwear can be bad, but bad it is. Justin Timberlake is a terrible miscast. And is Samuel L. Jackson really on a roll or what? This and Snakes on a Plane in one year? Maybe he can star in a black Adam and Eve story and complete a snake trifecta. "It wasn't me, God. That woman made me eat of the forbidden fruit after that motherfucking snake gave it to her. Damn!" It's entirely possible that what I saw as heavy-handed moralizing was a little more light and tongue-in-cheek, but it doesn't really matter. An ugly, rambling loosey-goosey, self-contradicting, poorly-written, gooey and trashy movie. I felt insulted.

Interview excerpts with Son House that bookended the movie were cool.

My crotch took a picture of the rest of me watching Black Snake Moan. Here's the picture: