The movie's appeal — or, rather, the title's, since until Thursday, not even Sam Jackson had seen the finished product — was the fact that it advertised its lack of pretensions up front. Whereas you might go to, say, Pulse merely hoping it would fall into the so-bad-it's-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.

I'VE HAD IT!: Jackson looks for motherfuckin' snakes.

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 that they proceeded to navigate around the theater. 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!") 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. What happened to the budding romance between the rich bitch and the Korean kickboxing guy?

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.