Hi, Burl here with a review of a very peculiar movie indeed! This one’s called Holy Wednesday, although it goes by other titles too, like Snakes and Fangs! But I’m pretty sure Holy Wednesday was the original title, and that was the title on the copy I saw, so although the other names might be better-known, insofar as the movie is known at all, Holy Wednesday is what I’ll call it!
Ha ha, but while over-sensationalizing the movie a bit, those other titles aren’t completely out to lunch, because snakes and their fangy bites are indeed a big part of this weird picture! But so is Wednesday, and in fact the movie seems to take place entirely on that special humpday, or anyway a series of them over maybe a month or so! The main character is Snakey Bender, played by Les Tremayne from The Monster of Piedras Blancas, who is known in and around his small town as the guy who loves snakes! The other thing he loves is Sousa marches, which he listens to every Wednesday evening with his good pal Burt!
Snakey has some other friends in town, including a lady teacher he visits each week, on Wednesdays I hope I don’t need to say, along with his biggest snake! Well, that lady teacher loves nothing more than to rub the snake on her breasts and genitals, and Snakey loves nothing more than to watch! Nobody asks the snake what he likes, but that’s life in a small town, I guess!
But as cozy an arrangement as all this is for Snakey, trouble is on the horizon! A cop gives Snakey traffic tickets, and a preacherman decides that keeping snakes is the Devil’s pastime! There’s a brother-sister pair of storekeepers, Bud and Sis they’re called, who also like to give Snakey trouble, and they’re also both in love with the schoolteacher! They figure out just how much the teacher loves Snakey’s snake, and use this curious information to blackmail the poor educator into a three way! This is mercifully and tastefully kept off screen, because those storekeepers are nobody’s dream dates, I have to say – Bud is straight out of Hee Haw while Sis is played by none other than Large Marge! Ha ha, I kept expecting her face to turn into a bug-eyed hamburger like it does in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, but no dice – I guess the makers of Holy Wednesday didn’t have the budget for special effects like that!
And to top it all off, Burt gets married, and his new wife is no fan of Sousa marches and calls a stop to the special Wednesday marching parties! That’s the end of the line for Snakey: he snaps and uses the only weapons he has, his massive collection of poisonous snakes! One by one he kidnaps his tormentors, strips them down to their underwear and contrives of various situations in which they’ll be bitten by serpents! Then he packs them into their cars and pushes them off a cliff! Ha ha, there’s quite a pile of cars at the bottom of that cliff before the movie comes to an end!
As I‘ve said, this is one oddball motion picture experience! It’s one of those movies that you watch and think to yourself, “Well, that story’s been told, ha ha!” It raises a lot of questions, like why Wednesday? Why not Friday or Saturday? And why doesn’t Snakey ever change his filthy overalls? Where’s he from, Oklahoma? I give Holy Wednesday two plummeting automobiles! I might have given it more just for being so weird, but, sorry Snakey, I can’t stand Sousa marches, and this darn movie is packed with them!
The film is definitely a cult item; weird, funny, horrifying. I'd swear Les's overalls could stand by themselves.
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