Have you ever been on a plane that kept hitting freaky turbulence or been cut off by some fascist stewardess trying to enforce some never-agreed-to dress code that involves pants? Well save your airplane horror stories, Julieanne Moore, you’ve still got nothing on a group of Qantas passengers last week who looked out at the wing on their flight from Cairns, Australia to Port Moresby, New Guinea, only to see a 10-foot scrub python on the wing, trying to reenact Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. It’s weird, a snake on your plane wing is actually a confusing mix of fears, like trying to dodge sharks while you’re prematurely ejaculating.

QF191 was about 20 minutes into its 6.15am flight from Cairns to Port Moresby on Thursday when a woman pointed outside the plane and told cabin crew: ”There’s a snake on the wing … There’s its head and if you look closely you can see a fraction of its body.’

But unlike Samuel L. Jackson’s 2006 fictional Hollywood blockbuster in which a nest of vipers causes death and destruction on a jet…

…Go on.

…this reptile was concerned only with self-preservation.

Nice, bro. Knowing what I know about Australians, it would be disappointing if no one shouted, “Thet’s naught a snoyke…”

While some passengers scoffed in disbelief, she was correct. Rick Shine, a snake expert at the University of Sydney, said the specimen was a ”very uncomfortable” scrub python, the longest snake in Australia.

Or, ALTERNATE SCENARIO, Ice Cube, who happens to be on the plane, jumps up and demands to know, Anaconda-style, “Yo dey got snakes out dere dis big?”

”There’s no way it could be anything else,” he said. ”They’re common in north Queensland. They’re ambush predators and if there are rodents anywhere nearby, they’ll most likely be in the vicinity. They often find their way into tight ceiling spaces in houses, although I’ve never heard of one on a plane until now.”

So you’re saying Qantas has rats? Are you sure they didn’t just confuse a baby kangaroo for a giant rat? That was always happening on Looney Tunes.

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After all that fun we had in the last post about Steven Seagal’s bulletproof kimono, it’s now my duty to totally harsh your mellow with a reminder that life is terribly short and probably meaningless. Have fun on those TPS reports. Anyway, David R. Ellis, a stuntman-turned director responsible for Snakes on a Plane and Shark Night 3D, who also did stunts on Smokey and the Bandit and Scarface, who every movie writer seems to have had a pleasant encounter or two with, was found dead in his Johannesburg hotel yesterday at the age of 60. He leaves behind a wife, three children, and countless fake dead snakes.

The 60-year-old, a chameleon of the entertainment industry who worked as an actor and stuntman earlier in his career, was found dead in the bathroom of his hotel room in the upscale neighborhood of Sandton in Johannesburg.
Police said Tuesday that the hotel manager discovered Ellis’ body at around 1 p.m. Monday. Ellis, 60, was last seen Saturday in a restaurant by a friend, reported the South African Press Association.
“Nothing was found to be missing from his room and no foul play is being suspected at this stage,” said Lt. Col. Lungelo Dlamini, a police spokesman, told the news agency.
In the years since its release, occasional discoveries of smuggled or concealed snakes in airports or aboard airplanes around the world invariably draw comparisons to Ellis’ thriller. Fortunately for the frequent flyer, such occurrences are rare.

Yes, thanks for that fact, NY Daily News. Very important.

In 2006, Ellis mused on whether the stuck-with-snakes theme would work in other movies while talking to Brian Finkelstein, whose “Snakes on a Blog” blog helped publicize the movie.
“`Titanic’ would be good with a ton of snakes, and at the same time, the boat’s going down. That would be kind of cool,” Ellis said. “Or `Cannonball Run,’ with snakes in every car. Or, you know, there’s a lot you could do. `Top Gun’ with snakes in their planes.”

Basically, he seemed like a good dude with a great sense of humor. Between him and Huell Howser, this has been a terrible, tragic week for beloved, cult media personalities. And with Ellis gone, who’s going to direct my script for The Black Shark Knight 3D? Martin Lawrence plays a regular guy who travels back in time and becomes a knight who fights sharks. We miss you already, David Ellis.

Snakes on Plane has now joined the conversation about the worst overdubbed profanity replacement in TV history, as an FX broadcast changed Sam Jackson’s famous line about matriarch-copulating snakes on a matriarch-copulating plane to “monkey-fighting snakes on a monday-to-friday plane.”  Is it worse than “finding a stranger in the Alps” in Big Lebowski or “Yippie kai-yay, Mr. Falcon” in Die Hard?  Hard to say, but these monkey-fighting snakes you speak of – they intrigue me.  Why didn’t you bring this up during pre-production?