Curse of Snakes Valley
1987 film by Marek Piestrak

Curse of Snakes Valley (Polish: Klątwa doliny węży, Estonian: Madude oru needus) is a 1988 Polish–Soviet Estonian adventure science fiction horror film directed by Marek Piestrak. The screenplay is loosely based on the Robert Stratton short story "The Hobby of Dr. Traven", which was published by the end of 1970s in the Polish magazine Przekrój.
The trio of adventurous pals, a man who is a scientist, a fine lady and a former military pilot are in the Indochina jungles, looking for some mysterious vase that holds a metal container that is of no mundane origin.
Curse of Snakes Valley was a great box office success. About 1 million viewers saw the film in Poland and as many as 25 million in the Soviet Union.
In 2022, New Orleans hip hop duo $uicideboy$ used clips of the film for the lyric video of their song "$uicideboy$ Were Better In 2015", off of their album Sing Me A Lullaby, My Sweet Temptation.
Plot
In 1954, during the First Indochina War, a helicopter is shot by partisans. It lands on the edge of the jungle. Military pilot Bernard Traven goes to a Buddhist temple while looking for water, from where he steals a precious casket.
“Curse of Snakes Valley” enters the record as 1987 film by Marek Piestrak. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Curse, Snakes and Valley can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Curse of Snakes Valley” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Curse, Snakes and Valley provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4184727. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2022, 2015 and 1954.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Curse of Snakes Valley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.