When I find myself in times of trouble, I reach for my copy of Snakes on a Plane

...Which I was going to announce as a “guilty pleasure” before I realised it’s too much fun for that. The 2006 feature length film about snakes on a plane called Snakes on a Plane still makes me laugh like nobody’s business, although it probably remains the biggest cinematic in-joke of all time.

The Snakes on a Plane phenomenon was a beautiful beautiful thing and took the following trajectory:

1. Everybody thought it was a joke
2. Worried producers change the title to the significantly less funny Pacific Air Flight 121
3. Samuel L Jackson speaks for the world when says: "We're totally changing that back. That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title"
4. Comedy outrage – it goes back to being Snakes on a Plane
5. Internet hilarity ensues to such an extent that there are even re-shoots to accommodate piss-take bits of made up script (see below).

Wonderful things can happen when web geeks get carried away, and thus they did, before Rickrolling was a twinkle in a meme addicts’ eye and before the marketing team even had time to come up with a real SoaP logo:

To add to the joyous swell of the DIY ethos, film critics went mad because they weren’t allowed to see it before it was released to the public, which only added to the growing feeling that this was going to be ridiculously self-indulgent. Of course we the fans knew that the only films critics are kept away from are the ones that truly stink, but the debate that raged among them – mostly in broadsheets – was funny in itself, as they moaned about the importance of their jobs as if they were working on a cure for cancer. And all this because of a film about snakes on a plane called Snakes on a Plane – it really couldn’t have got more wonderfully daft.

Samuel L Jackson was in his element hamming it up as FBI agent Neville Flynn, and who could fault the supporting cast of the wonderful Juliana Margulies, Kenan off of Kenan and Kel, and even comedy bit-part-totty Rachel Blanchard (Peep Show, Flight of the Conchords). B-list comedy heaven!

There was even anticipation the movie would evolve into some kind of Rocky Horror-like orgy of audience participation, but this generally stemmed from the fact that everyone got so excited about one single line of dialogue. One single line of dialogue, that again snuck its way into the script just because the internet community thought it was so funny. This one:

Ah. You've got to love Snakes on a Plane.

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