The fourth and final (for now) Wes Anderson short has a pretty cool premise but only a decent overall flow. It’s about a man who has a small venomous snake asleep on his stomach… and he’s been lying prone and motionless in hopes it won’t wake and bite him.

Like the previous three shorts in this series, the tale is told (probably) verbatim from the original short stories in a fairly direct way. It’s an affect that somehow both does and does not suit this particular story. The actors display a little fear but in a reserved way so as to not scare the snake… and that gives them a reason to be as stiff-upper-lipped. And yet there’s enough hints at emotion that it gets the point across. It’s an uneven approach that left me a little cold.

It’s interesting this story has moral message about overreaction, ego, and racism. I assume it’s in the original text but left a little blunt and ambiguous in the film. I assume the author knew the difference between venom and poison (as he used the word anti-venom correctly at one point) so I wonder if “poison” is meant in reference to the victim’s racist insults rather than its misapplication to the snake (which is venomous, not poisonous). If so, interesting… but I might be reading into it.

Either way, it’s a pretty decent tale that might have been told in a more inventive or creative way.

Did I mention these four Roald Dahl short story adaptations for Netflix should have been a single anthology movie? Because they should have been. But I appreciate they exist at all.

Score: 78