Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Matho The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

clanciai Ingmar Bergman didn't always make good films. He generally scripted his films himself, and he obviously didn't notice or care when his scripts were not very good but filmed them anyway. Although not a bad film, this is not an altogether good script.David Carradine as Abel Rosenberg, an American Jew, comes to Berlin in October 1923 and finds his brother Max dead in his bed having shot his brains out. That's how it begins.The brothers were circus trapeze artitsts and out of work, and the dead brother had a girl friend (separated, Liv Ullmann,) who tries to take care of Abel, which is not very easy, since he is constantly misbehaving and spends every day and night drinking. The local police inspector, (Gert Froebe) with whom he got in touch concerning his brother's suicide, consults Abel over a number of mysterious and atrocious murders, and Abel gets into a paranoic state believing himself to be a suspect, which doesn't make his own situation any better.The character of the film is consistently depressive, and the occasional interesting moments are the insights into the extreme and absurd conditions of Berlin and Germany in 1923, which gave rise to Hitler. This makes it a fascinating time documentary. The cabaret scenes lift the show to a bizarre level of gleeful decadence, but they also gradually go from bad to worse, especially when they are interrupted by power cuts and brutal razzias by hoodlums.Bergman made this film in Germany while he was in exile from Sweden, chased out of the country by clumsy tax authorities, and he admits himself in his autobiography that he like many Swedes were ardent Nazis before the war. So there are some interesting explanatory excuses and motives for the film.It emanates into a Kafkaesque nightmare into an archive of terrible human experimentation, definitely heralding Nazism, and ultimately into a very dramatic finale with Heinz Bennent, another cavalier of Liv Ullman's, which gives the film its meaning, but you have to wait for it through many long and absurd scenes, many without reason or meaning.

rixrex The title, The Serpent's Egg, had me wondering for a moment until I realized that it did not refer to the the Doctor and his bizarre experiments nor to Abel and his misery, but to the encapsulated Germany of the 1920s and the environment that led to Hitler's ascent in the 1930s. That is, Germany being the 'egg', Hitler and the Nazis as the 'Serpent', and the environment as the embryo of the egg.In many ways, this is a cynical film, in that it attempts to show that degradation, fear and loss of life and livelihood is sometimes stronger than humanity and even love. Isn't this true about Germany in the 1920s, and other nations at other times as well? We only have to look at ourselves after the attacks of 9/11 to see a time when fear overcame reason. Fear allowed us to meekly accept the chipping away of our own civil rights and privacy, and also government sponsored torture.It also gives us a glimpse at one of Hitler's truisms, which is that if he could have a person at age 7, then that person would be a Nazi for life. The experimenting Doctor re-states this in his observations that the sons and daughters of the defeated German populace will be the ones who create the new German society, of which he already is a part with his inhumane human experiments.Of course, all this is done with hindsight, so how can it be wrong? It can't, but then it's still a good review of a period in Germany that many Americans know nothing about, and should learn if they want the answers to the question of how Naziism came to be. It wasn't just some sort of aberration never seen in history before nor repeated.

sol- Often regarded as the nadir of Bergman's career, this film is not as terrible as one might understand it to be from its poor reputation, however it is not a very good film either. There are a handful of rather well composed shots, and other than the zooming, Sven Nykvist's camera-work is good. These are however the only real trademarks of Bergman in the film, and it does look as if anyone could have directed it. The two major downfalls though of the film are its screenplay and the acting by David Carradine. The script is dull, and the plot becomes rather messy as the film progresses, and even if the revelation is interesting, its insertion is quite awkward. Carradine tends to stumble about on set, and when he is not stumbling he is either haphazardly screaming or gaping. Many others have commented on his casting - it is hard to disagree that he was not the best choice. Either way, the film is hardly terrible, with some interesting ideas in the final quarter, some well directed scenes, and a great beginning credits sequence - but it is a low point for Bergman.

michelerealini The film is interesting, of course -it tells about the rise of Nazi power. But this is the less "bergmanian" film of Ingmar Bergman. It's not an intimate portrait of people -as the Swedish director always does. Here we have a big budget movie, with many actors... Although the presence of Liv Ullmann, Bergman loses his targets. On one side he wants to analyze a period, on the other one he has to follow more mainstream rules -because he works for a big budget production. As a result he "fails" (it's a big word) in both things -although the film is not a failure.We feel Ingmar Bergman is not really at ease. This is not his natural dimension -he's a super director because he has an extraordinary ability of understanding neurosis and anxieties, his favorite context are the relationships among a few people. In "The Serpent's Egg" these trademark are really minor.