Skid Roche

There are those of us, call us names if you will, for whom the brief media orgy that was Snakes on a Plane gave way to a slower, more relaxing, yet still oh-so-pulse-pounding kind of Snakes on a Plane orgy, with a groovy funk soundtrack.

Like the indecent touch of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, said SOAP-loving rapture may last, now, forever, or at least the nearly three years since the film’s most famous line first hit the interwebs.

That line, it’s been said, was not in the original script but was suggested in an internet chatroom by someone as the quintessential Samuel L. Jackson line. Is that true? I know not. I know only that the line, whoever penned it, grew from the collective unconscious. Its provenance reflects our deep human need to hear SLJ intone that thirteen-letter prayer to the dark gods of media; he is our priest, and SOAP our high mass, praise the Lord.

Since our krill-belching great-grandparents wriggled fishily out of the drink, we have longed for this moment. I have had it with these snakes. On this plane, cry great Moses, Vyasa, Lao, Buddah, Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Bobby Henderson — but their prayers go unanswered, until SLJ shows up to say it right.

And the good news? It works even better edited for TV.

Sometimes I ask: What are people thinking? But I don’t need to know: The pleasure this film brings me is like picking a scab, one with wriggling things underneath. Sometimes that’s good enough, srsly.