She will not go quietly into the night.
If you're scared of snakes, this is a given and perhaps may prevent you from even watching the movie and enjoying its silliness because you're overtaken with your fear of snakes biting people to death in the first place.Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- The gruesomeness of the passengers' deaths and injuries due to venomous snakebites. Having a wide variety of snakes around and attacking leads to a variety of results, ranging from rapid putrefaction to limbs severely swollen with fluid to foaming from the mouth or eyes to being squeezed to the point that all the blood goes to the victim's head, blood leaking from all orifices Dragon Kiss-style. The only person to have received a relatively clean death was Grace, the flight attendant who saved a passenger's baby.
- Special mention goes to a woman who gets bitten on the tongue by a snake hiding in her barf bag (pictured above). The next time we see her, she's convulsing, foaming at the mouth, her tongue's horribly inflamed, veins are popping out on her neck, and her eyes are rolling in the back of her head. Fridge Horror kicks in when you realise she probably suffocated to death either due to her swollen tongue or choking on her own vomit if the snake venom didn't kill her first.
- During the initial panic, one unfortunate guy gets knocked to the ground and trampled by a group of panicking passengers. The last one, a woman in heels, steps on his head and gets her heel stuck in his ear! The guy is left in agonizing pain, and we never see if he survived this ordeal. Given that he isn't seen among the surviving passengers at the end of the film, he most probably didn't.
- A couple of other men are fatally impaled when the railing of the stairs to the upper cabin gives way. One of them lives just long enough to pull the sharp chunk of debris he'd landed on from his own neck in a fountain of blood.
- The plane loses cabin pressure, so the oxygen masks drop from their ceiling compartments...and so do a ton of snakes. Cue the chaos. If avoiding aggressive venomous reptiles, maneuvering through cramped aisles and seats, and getting trampled by other panicking people wasn't hard enough, the plane also endures heavy turbulence from a thunderstorm, tossing the passengers (and snakes) about the cabin like they're caught in an earthquake. Mercedes and Maria are among those unfortunate enough to get knocked unconscious due to said turbulence.
- After Chen saves Mercedes and Mary-Kate, he carries them to the front of the plane piggyback style while Mercedes bats away any attacking snakes with her purse. This is shown through a long tracking shot of them moving through the snake-infested aisle with the numerous corpses of dead passengers littering the seats. You really can't blame a terrified Mercedes for sobbing as they pass a corpse with a particularly swollen and discoloured face.
- Maria, the mother who brought her infant child aboard, gets a horrible dose of fear when she regains consciousness only to find her baby missing from her swaddle. Even if it wasn't in a plane filled with venomous snakes, having your child suddenly disappear out of sight is bound to be a nightmare for just about any parent in any setting.
- Thankfully, Grace finds the baby... at just about the same time as a rattlesnake. If the former hadn't heard the baby crying, a horrible Death of a Child would have happened.
- After the surviving passengers and crew make it to and wall off the front part of the cabin, Claire and Tiffany check the passenger list for a doctor to help those suffering from snakebites and other injuries. On the list is a Dr. Robert Foster...who they find as a corpse, still in his seat, and just in time to see a snake slither out of his mouth.
- When the remaining passengers are forced to retreat up to First Class, their snake problems get worse as a massive freakin' python makes an entrance by slithering into a lightbox and crash-landing near them due to the glass shattering under its weight. Paul the obnoxious British businessman attempts to distract it by throwing Mercedes's pet dog to it as a snack and is promptly rewarded for his actions by having the python wrap around him instead, leading to the aforementioned Dragon-Kiss death above.
- The premise itself, if played straight, is Nightmare Fuel incarnate. Imagine this: Snakes are usually defensive creatures that avoid humans and only start biting whenever they feel like they're being threatened. Flip that around and turn the snakes into more offensive creatures that would bite you just because you're near and not even provoking them and you're pretty much trapped with a bunch of killer creatures that go against their otherwise defensive nature.
Flynn: Enough is enough! I have had it with these muthafuckin' nightmares in my muthafuckin' sleep! Everybody strap in! I'm about to open some Sweet Dreams Fuel.
