Watch Stanley For Free

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Tim Ochopee(Chris Robinson)is a young Seminole Indian returning from the war in Vietnam with emotional scars, bitter and seeking revenge for his father's death. He wants to spend his life in seclusion with his pet rattlesnake Stanley and mate Hazel. Tim makes a meager living by selling snake venom to a clinic for snake bite antidote. He is being pressured to sell his houseful of snakes to a snakeskin clothing manufacturer(Alex Rocco). Tim refuses and is being bullied by the same men that "accidentally" killed his father. The young Seminole will rely on his pet Stanley and family of rattlers as protection from his attackers. This movie is filled with too much dead time between situations. This low-budget horror flick lacks dialoge and seems to lumber along. Also in the cast: Susan Carroll, Paul Avery and 1960's singer Steve Alaimo.

This movie was included in a recent "Gorehouse Greats" 12 movie pack collection which I picked up for about $5. Stuff in these collections tend to be public domain movies that no one cares about keeping the rights to anymore, so I wasn't expecting "good" movies, in the sense that the movies had budgets, or name actors, or even good writing and screenplays. But you always hope to find a hidden diamond-in-the-rough, or a minor "classic" that you'd never heard of before, or something to take you back to the drive-in/grindhouse/late-night TV movies of your youth.Well, "Stanley" is about as good as this collection gets. There's a halfway decent, if somewhat derivative, film trying to get out from under the cheap film stock, the bad costumes, the crappy sets and the terrible,clichéd dialog and by-the-numbers plot. There's some very nice nature photography that someone must have spent a lot of time and effort to get right. There's a theme about ecology and respecting nature that never made it into "Willard" (either version). The lead actor has some charisma and manages to actually make some of the one-sided dialogs he has with his snake pal "Stanley" sort of work sometimes. The, er,snake wrangling was well done and the actors and reptile wranglers did a good job keeping the interactions between humans and snakes believable. The chief "villain" was kind of amusing to watch. And there were three very effective scenes - one where Tim (the "hero") throws snakes into the quicksand where a couple of the bad guys are trapped, one where the boss jumps into his pool only to realize, too late, that there are water moccasins in it, and the final shot of Tim's house burning down when his final breakdown leads to his personal Armageddon.As for the rest, well...it's strictly drive-in filler. The screenplay tries to play the "Vietnam Vet" card to give the movie some depth, but in my book, you can't just use that as an all purpose cover story. You have to provide specific examples or flesh the character out better with personal tics and stories the character can relate to the rest of the cast. Tim just kind of looks generically broody and sad.Also, Tim's main "opposition", the bad guys who work for the boss are the lamest caricatures you can imagine. They don't say or do anything that interests the viewer or surprises them - they're just there to be bitten by Stanley. Still, as I said, there's some decent stuff in here. If you can't get enough of "Willard" themed movies, here's another one for you.

When broadcast TV stations actually showed movies other than re-runs, infomercials and syndicated TV shows this film always seemed to in on every couple of weeks. the plot has an ex-vet named Tim living out in the Everglades because society doesn't take kindly to his being an Indian. Keeping pretty much to himself he makes fiends with the wildlife, particularly the rattle snakes including one he names Stanley. When he feels pressured he uses his snakes to get revenge on the people he feels have wronged him.Good thriller isn't really scary. To be certain your feelings toward snakes will determine the amount of squirming you'll do since this film is full of snakes from start to finish. Well acted the film has a nice feeling of believability to it even as it hits all of the right exploitation high notes. Watching the film again for the first time in at least a decade I was shocked at how well the film has stood up. While no classic it does what it does nicely and then gets off the screen.Definitely recommended. I'm rating it 6 out of 10 because I'm not sure what a fair rating is. My feelings toward the film are higher than that, but I'm not sure its not purely surprise that the film holds up as well as it does.

Partial spoilers. I just saw it again yesterday, even though I've known it on and off for a long while. Even though I've only ever read one or two reviews of it, I've always been able to hear "Willard rip-off!" as the usual song about this movie. There's probably no way to convince anyone who thinks so, but it ISN'T. (Even though I'm sure Willard was responsible for Stanley being made in the first place, but that isn't the same thing.) And even though the endings are similar - you can probably see that from a mile away - this one handles the idea in its own pretty clever way. Chris Robinson - long before he uttered the famous and infamous words, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV," though he was already well-known - manages to be really believable as the likable main character, who's slowly coming apart, but believable in a completely different way from Bruce Davison as Willard. And of course, "Stanley" - whether you love or hate them - is a genuine "animals strike back" story, which Willard wasn't trying to be in most ways, of course. Except that, like that character, Tim is also killing a lot of PERSONAL enemies, but it's still a case of him vs. the poachers, until the end, of course. And Alex Rocco as a loudmouthed semi-comical villain (think Moe Greene in The Godfather) is something most people either LOVE or HATE, and for me, it's always the former.