Snails have never been big in the movies. Oh yeah, there was Dr Doolittle's giant pink snail. That was big. Literally. But apart from that one, where are the gastropod monster movies? Where's Snailzilla? Attack of the Killer Snails? Night of the ... You get the picture.
I searched the International Movie Database for all snail-related titles. Almost every full-length film with snail in the title was a foreign language work. And almost none of them had anything to do with real honest-to-goodness snails.
Here's the whole sorry list. What a travesty.
1918
The Snail
An American movie with Shorty Hamilton and Ethel Terry.
1971
Shablul (The Snail)
An Israeli musical/comedy/documentary about the making of an album by Arik Einstein and Shalom Hanoch.
1977
Tin loh daai poh ng hang chan (Deadly Snail vs. Kung Fu Killers)
A kung fu movie (you don't say?) from Hong Kong. Interestingly, the Hong Kong English title used snail but the international title replaced it with snake. Are they saying that snails aren't sufficiently intimidating? Ha! That can't be right.
1992
Gde tvoy dom, ulitka? (Where's Your Home, Snail?)
A movie from Kyrgyzstan. Were I more enthusiastic, I would render the title in Cyrillic*. But I'm not, so I won't. You can read more about this movie on the University of Pittsburgh Russian film symposium site.
1993
La Estrategia del caracol (The Snail's Strategy)
A political comedy set in Colombia. This commentary makes it sound rather interesting even though the snail of the title is only metaphorical.
1996
The Paisley Snail
This is more like it. There's a real snail in this one. Unfortunately it was at the bottom of a bottle ginger beer and kicked off a great legal adventure that shaped modern negligence laws. According to the film's website, the film stars 'Neil Connery, of the famous Scottish Connerys.' So you can't miss it.
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*I did Russian for two years in secondary school but that was a long time ago. An awfully long time ago. It shaped my opinion about sociology though. (Stick with me here.) All classes did either French or German from first year. In third year, we were streamed. The top group did Russian, the intermediate group did Spanish and the bottom group sociology ...
