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FROGS FOR SNAKES

Content:

Strong pagan wordlview with moral viewpoint against violence & criminal activity plus aberrant comment that the Bible says not to kill but doesn't mention anything about maiming; 157 obscenities & 10 profanities plus some graphic & mild sexual remarks; extreme violence such as woman shoots two men in foot, man beats other man unconscious, several people shot to death brutally, & drunken doctor sews up man's bloody wound; brief depicted fornication, implied fornication & implied oral sex, plus sado-masochism & woman graphically describes oral sex; rear nudity, upper male nudity, woman & men in underwear, & images of women in sado-masochistic outfits, including one photo of upper female nudity; alcohol use & drunkenness; and, loan sharking, adultery, murder for hire, murder to wipe out competition for acting roles, gangsterism, revenge, & gangsters use the name of Jesus in swearing to tell the truth.

More Detail:

FROGS FOR SNAKES is an unlikely story about a group of New York City gangsters & their women who attend an acting class and put on off-Broadway productions of famous plays like A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and AMERICAN BUFFALO. Barbara Hershey plays Eva, the divorced wife of Big Al, who runs a loan shark business and produces plays in his spare time. Al is so proud of his reputation as an “impressario” that the license plates on his car read “2BNOT2B.” Eva is tired of hanging around Al’s gang and wants to live on the beach, away from the city. She finds herself, however, caught in the crossfire when Al’s buddies, including his current girlfriend Simone, start murdering one another in bizarre fits of acting jealousy.

Written as a satire, FROGS FOR SNAKES is shot like a crime drama and character study, losing all sense of intelligibility. Unlike Woody Allen in BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, writer and director Amos Poe fails to realize that brutal murders, especially when performed like something out of a Martin Scorsese movie, completely ruin any sense of humor or fantasy in what is, essentially, a satirical premise. The only saving grace of all this is that Eva clearly is appalled at the lifestyle the gangsters around her have created. The movie’s sympathies remain with her to the last shot.