In a jungle, a guide takes Professor King and his son Jason to look for the Professor’s daughter who has been brainwashed by a voodoo cult that worships snakes. They find the cult too late to save the daughter’s life. The guide is killed, and Jason shoots the leader of the cult. Before he dies the cult leader puts a curse on young Jason and his family.
Forty years later Jason (Yuen Kao) owns a construction company and is building a high-rise apartment complex. A pit of snakes is unearthed at the construction site. Reportedly the snakes are led by something called a “warrior python”. The snakes are burned, and a man called a Serpent Master is called in to deal with the python. The Serpent Master kills the giant snake.
Jason’s wife, Michelle (Kathleen Lu) has been having dreams about the voodoo cult that was responsible for the death of Jason’s sister. The cult’s leader is a voodoo snake priestess (Eartha Kitt). Out of concern for her husband, Michelle goes to Los Angeles, California to talk to an expert in voodoo snake cults, Dr. Morgan Bates (Clint Walker). Morgan is the son of the guide that was killed by the snake cult. Morgan refuses to help her and tells her to go home.
Morgan’s assistants, Dr. Tim Muffett (Christopher Mitchum) and Laura Chase (Anne Lockhart) decide to help Michelle. The three of them go out into the Mexican desert to find the cult, which appears to have relocated there. They end up captured by the cult. Morgan shows up to rescue them but the cult, and its priestess isn’t done with Jason King or his construction company.
“The Serpent Warriors” AKA “Snake Inferno” AKA “Golden Viper” was released somewhere around 1987 and was supposedly directed by Chi Chang, John Howard and Niels Rasmussen. It is a Taiwanese American Hong Kong horror film. The film is comprised of two and perhaps three movies mushed together. Most of the snake footage is from the 1982 film “Calamity of Snakes”. The version of the film I have is partly in English (the new stuff) and partly in what might be Mandarin (the Calamity of Snakes stuff). My copy doesn’t have any subtitles for the Mandarin portion, but it’s not all that difficult to follow along. Sometime in the 90’s the movie was re-released as “Snakes Revenge” with some additional digital snakes added. From my understanding “Calamity of Snakes” was also the springboard for a Pakistan version called “Revenge of the Snakes” released somewhere around 1982. There is also a Korean cut floating around somewhere called “War Between Men and Snakes”.
The snake footage from “Calamity of Snakes” is cut way down but there are a few new ones added. It’s not as frantic as the “Calamity” stuff but one of the strangest is a snake ceremony where guys in loin cloths walk around in a circle with snakes hanging from their mouths. What the movie lacks in snakes, it makes up for in gun fights.
Some reviews of the film mention that the voodoo snake cult expert goes to the high-rise excavation site to battle the multitude of snakes. That is wrong. Clint Walker and his co-horts never make it out of the Mexican desert. All the high-rise footage is from “Calamity” and Clint was never in that movie. The last ten minutes or so was total snake chaos, but Eartha Kitt gets the last word. Bottom line, the movie is a bit of a mess, but a rather entertaining one.
Clint Walker’s voice seems to have been dubbed but there is no mistaking Eartha Kitt’s voice as being real.