I just have to describe how The Snake Woman starts. It can't maintain its hilarity through its whole runtime but that's okay, because what we get at the beginning more than compensates for a little bit of boredom.
We're in good hands right at the gates when a somber narrator informs us that the tale we are about to hear is a legend passed down "from generation to generation," but one "which the residents of the town would rather forget." In 1890, a snake researcher named Dr. Adderson (sic) is conducting strange experiments. By "strange experiments," I mean he's convinced that snake venom is the cure to mental illness, and therefore he's been injecting his insane wife with snake venom. Did I mention that Mrs. Adderson is pregnant? Curiously, much of the poor woman's protest comes from the fact that "we don't know what all that poison will do to me!" Hmm...I dunno, I think we can make some presumptions. She's also worried that the venom will hurt the baby, but Adderson is convinced that being raised by a madwoman is infinitely worse than being deformed or killed by in-utero toxins. Rather unsurprisingly Mrs. Adderson goes into premature labor (very premature, I should say, given that she doesn't look more than a month pregnant), and Dr. Adderson, whose medical credentials are already in question, has to fetch another doctor to deliver the baby. At first they're sure the girl is dead, because she's as cold as ice. Similarly, she has a weirdly shaped mouth and black, lidless eyes. Despite this, she still breathes, and when she's handed to her mother, she releases a hissing sound. The shock of this is too horrible for Mrs. Adderson and she dies. The midwife on hand, Aggie Harker, is rumored to be something of a witch, and she's convinced now that the baby has the power to kill with a glance. Adderson stops her from murdering the child but the old woman gets a mob that's more curious and weak-willed than angry to go wreck Adderson's laboratory. Cue the scene where the mob smash the glass cages of the snakes while setting the place on fire, releasing a large breeding population of deadly animals into their community when the fire chases them away before they can kill them all. Adderson dies when he tries to grab a snake by the head, causing it to bite his hand. Dr. Murton, the real doctor who delivered Adderson's baby, brings the child to a local hermit, who must keep him for the night while Murton goes to Africa to do...something. (Don't worry, it's not plot related, he just doesn't have the right schedule to pencil in idiots orphaning their own babies.) The idea is that Adderson will seek them out in the morning and retrieve the child but they don't know the dumb idiot is dead. The hermit raises the girl, named "Atheris" (an ancient name for a snake), until she's old enough to embrace her full powers as a weresnake. When Murton finally returns it's been years since Atheris scared away the hermit's animals and eventually vanished into the wilderness. Now the town is plagued by mysterious murders, and some white dude whose name I literally can't remember shows up to learn things we can already figure out until Atheris dies.
If you boil our plot down further, then we get this: maniac creates weresnake at expense of his family and the safety of his community, and then an outside agent kills the monster when said monster turns murderous. It's Frankenstein, people--but with a very strange Dr. Frankenstein at that. I hope I'm not alone in thinking that Adderson is fucking cracked. Now, it is true that snake venom-derived drugs have been effective medicinally. ACE inhibitors, for example, used to control high blood pressure, are derived from the venom of the Brazilian pit viper. Adderson cites a variety of ailments that can be treated with snake venom and some of them are accurate (though I have to wonder if such medicine existed at the turn of the century). Note that I used the word "derived," though; as far as I understand you can't just straight up milk a snake and put that right into somebody's veins. Poisons are more complicated than that. Okay, fine, there's a meta-reason--writer exaggeration (it's not like snake venom would turn someone into a weresnake either; mothers who eat honey while pregnant don't give birth to werebees, or wereflowers for that matter). But consider also that Addison hasn't the faintest idea of how to deliver a baby. I get that he's a herpetologist, but he's also performing medical procedures on someone, implying he does have a degree in medicine. Yet I know people who have undergraduate degrees in medicine who know how to deliver a baby. I'm sure in a doctoral program it comes up at least once. So Adderson is both unethical and incompetent as a doctor, but he's both those things as a herpetologist too, as evidenced by his grabbing a poisonous snake incorrectly, leading to his death. I'd say he was emotionally disturbed and didn't know what he was doing, but the double revelation of his wife's death plus the fact that he fathered a snake-human hybrid doesn't even make him blink. He has a heart of stone, that Horace Adderson.
You cannot possibly hope to salvage a movie after that. Even though it loses inertia The Snake Woman is still haunted by the ghost of that bone-rattlingly awful opening. It just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. More and more bullshit. What we are left with in the second half are two interesting details--the first being that Atheris sheds her skin. The effect for the shed human skin is actually somewhat convincing, though they don't show it in great light. The second detail is more a lesson to storytellers and filmmakers everywhere, embodied perfectly in the quick-stop lurch of focus this second half engages in: don't kill off your primary cast halfway through and expect us to care about who replaces them. It's not like Norman Bates also killed off Sam Loomis in the first part of Psycho.
The Snake Woman is yet another breathtaking exercise in copious incompetence. Profit by the laughs it gives you.
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