FILM REVIEW OF ''JAWS OF SATAN'' (1981)

The best thing about "Jaws of Satan" aka "King Cobra" are the snakes.
This bottom of the barrel horror movie grafts together the plot from
"Jaws" and "The Exorcist." Satan slithers into a rural Alabama town
where a race dog track is going to open and starts killing the
residents. Seems that the hooded cobra has eyes for Fritz Weaver's
doubting Catholic priest. Gretchen Corbett plays a m.d. who wants to
get to the bottom of the mystery. Veteran character actor Norman Lloyd
has a brief role as an older priest. This movie flopped big-time, and
like somebody else said here, the director Bob Claver made this his
only theatrical film. Not bad enough to be funny, just bad enough to be
bad. When I was a TV news reporter working in Columbus, Mississippi, I
got to interview Weaver and a couple of the crew while they were making
this dogie across the line in Eutaw, Alabama. As a matter of fact,
Eutaw had had a dog racing track. Most of the film was shot on
location, too, and that antebellum house is the real deal. What I most
remember about reporting on this movie was the snakes. They used real
snakes and they didn't put Plexiglas between the actors and the snakes,
because the snake wrangler somehow convinced them not to worry. Anyway,
a real stinker. Again, like somebody else said, the rattlesnake in the
bathtub was a letdown scene. All the shots of the snakes still look
great, especially the king cobra's close-up. Talk about a snake-bit
movie.