Two words: Snakes, Planes (SoaP)

Airplane. Snakes. That's enough to pack American movie houses ('cinemas') for a new hit film that's raking in big bucks and bad reviews. Word ('buzz') in Hollywood is that Samuel L. Jackson, a truly guaranteed box-office draw, agreed to the film when he heard the title - and threatened to leave the project when its producers hinted they might change the film's name to 'Pacific Air Flight 121'. The film's plot, which can be summarised that an airplane has snakes on board, has Jackson, famed for 'Star Wars', 'Pulp Fiction,' and other hits, playing an FBI agent who escorts a witness for the prosecution on a flight to testify. The bad guys (the upright, non-slithery kind) find out and let a large number of venomous rattlesnakes loose in board the Boa, er, Boeing, in an effort to keep the witless, er, witness, from reaching the courtroom.

We don't know how it ends and we don't care. We suspect that very few of the millions who have seen the film know or care either. But an audience out in Phoenix probably does. They went to see this cinematic achievement ("cast of thousands, or at least hundreds") at a screening to which some cineastes brought (at least) two young diamondback rattlers and let them out, right after the plane (did we mention it has snakes on board?) takes off. A spokesman for the Phoenix Herpetological Society denounced the prank, because, it seems, snakes get scared in dark places like movie theatres.

The movie's a runaway hit, with entrepreneurs flogging tee-shirts showing smiley little rattlers in a cockpit and the acronym 'SoaP' is grabbing headlines. Airline unions have picked up on it, too, pointing out that they're not the snakes on the plane. Still, something very deep in the human psyche must be touched by those two words: 'planes' and 'snakes'. Or is it 'snakes', then 'planes'?

(Thanks to Topato Co for the pic).