The forthcoming movie Snakes on a Plane has become a minor piece of web folklore after its makers filmed five additional days of footage nearly six months after finishing principal photography — to incorporate online criticism and suggestions into the movie. Most of that focused around the widespread disbelief that somebody could make a film called “Snakes on a Plane” starring Samuel L. Jackson and not have him say something along the lines of “There’s motherf-ing snakes on the motherf-ing plane!” The movie comes out August 18 with the line in there.

Mr. Jackson is pretty excited about this movie, telling a crowd at the MTV Movie Awards that it will be the best film of the year, unless he decides to make one called “Mo’ Mothaf-ing Snakes on Mo’ Mothaf-ing Planes”. Apparently. So he’s participated in a marketing campaign by which users can create a customized voice message from him they can send to their friends’ phones, reminding them to go see the movie when it comes out August 18.

There’s been stuff like this before — I seem to remember Target or another store offering wake-up calls from celebrities including Kermit the Frog on the day after Thanksgiving to prompt them to get up and go shopping — but this is fairly clever. In addition to asking for a name, users are asked to choose from a drop-down menu what their friend does for a living, a hobby and a physical attribute, all of which get worked in to the call. Somewhat sadly, the site will only send calls between 8am and 10pm. That’s probably a good thing on balance, but it could be quite entertaining to wake somebody up at 4am with Samuel L. Jackson going on about snakes on an airplane.

Of course, New Line Cinema’s privacy policy leaves a little bit to be desired: “We use the information that you provide about others to enable us to send them your gifts or cards. From time to time, we also may use this information to offer our products, programs, or services to them.” While this is a novel and fun idea, the movie studio’s apparently belief that they’ve got the permission to spam anybody whose number gets entered without their consent isn’t real cool. Some assurance that this isn’t the case on the site would be appreciated.

That in mind, it’s probably not worth trying. He doesn’t even say “motherf-ing snakes on the motherf-ing plane”.

[tags]mobile, snakes on a plane, samuel l jackson[/tags]

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