Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rattlesnake’ on Netflix, a Horror-Thriller That’ll Give You Hissy Fits

Netflix’s Halloween-season horror-movie deluge wraps with Rattlesnake, a thriller starring Carmen Ejogo as a mom who goes to extreme lengths to save her daughter’s life. And by “goes to extreme lengths,” I mean “endures a crazy-ass supernatural-slash-existential threat.” So is this movie a slow, constricting, suspenseful squeeze? A series of quick, sharp, venomous bites? Or just a boring old garter snake, waiting for a breakfast slug to slime on by?

‘RATTLESNAKE’: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Katrina (Carmen Ejogo) and her six-year-old daughter Clara (Apollonia Pratt) pass the now-entering-Texas sign. There’s a traffic backup, so Katrina takes the nearest exit ramp. BAD IDEA, we all yell at the screen. Soon enough, they’re on a nothing road in the middle of nowhere and nobody’s around. Katrina can’t get a cell signal for the GPS. Bang! Flat tire. TOLD YOU IT WAS A BAD IDEA, we yell. Clara dinks around in the roadside scrub (BAD IDEA!) while Katrina righty-tighty-lefty-looseys the lugnuts. Zap! A rattlesnake leaps from the brush and double-harpoons its fangs into poor Clara’s leg. PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING CHILDREN, we yell out the window at whatever movie producers might be in earshot. IT’S TOO STRESSFUL!

Katrina looks up. There’s a big rusty mobile home in the field. FUNNY, WE DIDN’T SEE THAT A MINUTE AGO WHEN THE CAMERA GAVE US A BIG WIDE SHOT OF THE LOCATION, we murmur quite loudly. She picks up Clara, runs over and barges in. A Disconcertingly Calm Woman (Debrianna Mansini) lives there. In a disconcertingly calm voice, she says she can help Clara, but the girl needs a doctor soon so Mom should leave the kid and go take care of that tire. NOT IDEAL BUT WHAT’RE YOU GONNA DO, we shrug. Katrina finishes the tire, goes back, finds Clara magically healed with no wounds or anything, and there’s no sign of the woman. MUST’VE USED VOODOO, we scream. OR WINDEX.

Clara is soon asleep in a hospital bed. The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with her. “I know this sounds crazy, but,” Katrina says. Yelling: BUT WE JUST HEARD SAM WORTHINGTON SAY THE EXACT SAME THING IN NETFLIX ORIGINAL MOVIE FRACTURED TWO WEEKS AGO. Then, a strange man visits the room and says Clara’s soul has been saved, but Katrina needs to pay back… someone? Something? SATAN? we blurt. The deal? “A soul for a soul.” And it’s gotta happen before sunset. Today. Sunset today. That’s seven hours from now. She’s unconvinced, but soon is un-unconvinced by a series of gory and/or weird hallucinations that no one else can see. What would you do to save your precious child’s life? GOOD GOD I DUNNO, we holler.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Not Anaconda, not Snakes on a Plane, not Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid and not 1973 classic Sssssss, starring Strother Martin and Dirk Benedict. It has a bit of It Follows in it, though. Same for that movie most of us forgot about called The Box, where Cameron Diaz and James Marsden were given a box with a button in it and if they pressed it, someone somewhere died and they got a million dollars.

Performance Worth Watching: In all sincerity, Ejogo does a terrific job of selling this ridiculousness.

Memorable Dialogue: “No one deserves to be hurt. No one!” Kat tells her daughter. OH NO, YOU SPOKE TOO SOON MOM EJOGO. YOU SPOKE TOO SOOOOOON!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: About two-thirds of Rattlesnake is a pretty suspenseful absurd contrived thriller with supernatural elements, but by the third act, it becomes a limp-ass cop-out absurd contrived thriller with supernatural elements. Ejogo works and works and works to get her character off her burning-hot spot over the plot barrel, but it’s all undermined by the screenplay gods, who just write her out of it, then write her a nonsense conclusion because they didn’t know how to end it. They also failed to write her a character with more than 2.7 traits: she’s a mom, she has some guts, maybe she has it in her to kill a person? They should write us a thank-you letter for sitting through this bologna.

Not all films need explicit resolution. Ambiguity is good. It challenges us to piece things together, or interpret as we may. Rattlesnake is a rough sketch, a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with 81 pieces missing, an unfinished draft. Writer-director Zak Hilditch (1922) generates suspense by putting an existential threat against his protagonist’s head and cocking the hammer, and having her race against the clock to commit murder. There’s a pretty effective sequence where Katrina buys a gun from a shifty weirdo, wades into some pretty deep moral-justification straits and starts flying by the seat of her pants, and it’s really hard to determine where this thing is going, which I’ve reflected by mixing my metaphors. We wonder if grim doom-monger Michael Haneke sneaked in to direct the final act. And then some random bull roar happens.

Our Call: SKIP IT. What you’ve got here is a dead snake.

Your Call:

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Rattlesnake on Netflix