Curse II: The Bite

Federico Prosperi directed Curse II: The Bite under the pseudonym Fred Goodwin, and B-movie mainstay Ovidio G. Assonitis produced it as a loose, in-name-only sequel to 1987’s The Curse. The effects were designed and built out of George’s own Los Angeles shop, S.M.G. Inc., then hauled out to the desert location in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where his crew applied the prosthetics on set.

George later named Curse II among the effects jobs immediately before Society. ¹

The transformation runs in visible stages. Clark (J. Eddie Peck), bitten by a radioactive snake, gets a hand that swells and discolors on screen across a run of appliances. The hand then splits open and a living snake head takes its place, jaws and tongue working. The climax pushes the mutation through his entire body: chest and face swelling, flesh splitting at the torso and throat as dozens of snakes pour out of him on camera. How the rigs behind these shots actually worked — what ran on cable, what ran on air — no one close to the crew has ever put on record; the reviews describing it are describing what’s visible on screen, not the build.

Scream Factory restored the snake-hand to a clean print for its 2016 double-feature Blu-ray release, paired with The Curse.