"I can't believe it's really happening!" cried a voice in the dark. But there it was, in cheap white letters floating over a tropical backdrop: Snakes on a Plane. After months of blog frenzy, old-media catch-up and a studio doing its best to stay out of the way of a phenomenon it didn't understand but knew better than to mess with, it was, indeed, hard to believe it could all come down to 100 or so minutes in a not-quite-full theater.

Does SoaP live up to the hype? More like down to it. The movie's appeal — or, rather, the title's, since until last night, not even Sam Jackson had seen the finished product — was its promise to put on no airs, to advertise its lack of pretensions up front. Whereas you might go to, say, Pulse merely hoping it would fall into the so-bad-its-good category, SoaP as much as promised it would. Only the sight of Crow T. Robot's silhouette against the screen could have put the audience in a more appropriate frame of mind.

The excitement in the theater, which began to fill up half an hour before showtime, was audible, if not palpable. Limbering up their snappy-comment muscles, the crowd (almost entirely white and under 25) filled the time by yelling things like "Snakes!" and "Snakes on a what?" One brave young woman draped her arms with rubber snakes, while a half-dozen souls produced a cardboard plane which they proceed to navigate down one set of stairs and up the other. A safe journey, unperturbed by motherfuckin' snakes.

Sadly, the level of creativity dipped noticeably once the lights dimmed (though some wag aimed a perfectly timed "Boring!" at the trailer for The Departed.) With 30 minutes to fill before the snakes made their first appearance, the crowd did its best to fill the dead space, but there wasn't much to grab on to. (After the movie made its umpteenth joke at the expense of a swishy but apparently straight flight attendant, one jokester helpfully yelled out, "Faggot!" Nice one, dude.) At last, the reptilian fury was unleashed, and how. Director David Ellis, late of the Final Destination series, contrives an awe-, or at least unease-, inspiring assortment of deaths by snakebite, with the inflamed ophidians latching onto just about every body part you'd prefer they didn't. (A few particularly gory and/or off-color demises must have been among the reshoots New Line ordered when they realized their PG-13 thriller would play better as R-rated camp.) The setup is standard danger-at-10,000-feet stuff, but the movie loses track of most of its carefully stereotyped passengers — like, what happened to the budding romance between the rich bitch and the Korean kickboxing guy?

The crowd, of course, were mainly there to revel in Samuel L. Jackson's blackness, eagerly lapping up each badassssss quip. ("Snakes on crack," indeed.) On the way in, we passed a knot of incipient SoaPers acting out the "bad motherfucker" scene from Pulp Fiction — although it wasn't nearly so convincing when one of them turned his best Bad Sam an African-American security guard. "My bad, my bad," he apologized.

In the end, SoaP is neither as good nor as bad as you might hope — certainly not as brilliantly reductive as its ultra-high-concept moniker. It's too bad New Line couldn't have saved us all a lot of trouble and just released the title Now there's a movie I'd pay to not see.

Fri., Aug. 11, 10 p.m., UA Riverview
Horror flicks have a built-in constituency, so it's not surprising that Pulse, Wes Craven's hop onto the J-horror bandwagon, enjoys a packed house on opening night, largely made up of black guys providing play-by-play. The existential loneliness of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's original, an unsettling, slow-build apocalypse brought on by the soul-draining isolation of technological society, is jettisoned in favor of another batch of pretty students being chased by monsters. Craven's script makes little comment on the ubiquity of cell phones and laptops (though the message seeps through to the crowd — one creepy-looking character is met by a shout of, "He's been on MySpace too long!"), but merely uses them as delivery systems for cheap scares, a tactic that worked for him with dreams in Elm Street and didn't with electricity in Shocker. Kurosawa's meticulous pace wouldn't have survived this room, where one brief lull with a grief counselor evokes, from the incessant commentators in my row, the inexplicable comment, "He's the white Dr. Phil!" Still, music video director Jim Sonzero's Aphex Twin ghosties don't seem to make the grade even with this crowd; given the level of grumbling and all the text messaging happening as the credits roll, Pulse may share the death-by-cell fate of its characters.

Sat., Aug. 12, 11:45 a.m., Neshaminy Mall
The crowd gathered for the matinee screening of Tim Allen's latest is a motley one. On second thought, make that "audience"; 15 or so people scattered around a near-empty theater don't constitute a crowd. There are the expected kid/parent clusters, a couple of guys who are either very dedicated comic book fans or completist movie bloggers, and a few single-seaters likely more concerned with soaking up AC than about what's on the screen. It's almost sad watching the streams of families rush past Zoom's neglected theater en route to Barnyard or The Ant Bully, but when your movie's credits follow "Starring Tim Allen" with the even more chilling "Songs by Smash Mouth," you've built a damned effective scarecrow. Those foolhardy enough to proceed are rewarded with a sloppily constructed third-generation Spy Kids retread, covered over with the makeshift Band-Aids of clumsy editing and abundant ADR that suggest somebody eventually just shrugged and gave up. The kids next to me sit with their heads resting on fists for most of it, suggesting that they at least find something more interesting to think about, while their mother catches up on some sleep. Tim Allen: a lack of appeal that spans generations.