[1] It is based on the 1979 novel Death Bite by Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan Reclusive millionaire philanthropist Jason Kincaid lost his brother to a massive taipan serpent during a hunting trip in Micronesia.

Crowley bribes a sailor on the ship transporting it to the United States to help secure it, but the mole is killed when he attempts to look inside the snake's container and is bitten.

As Brasilian insists on keeping the snake at his university laboratory until Kincaid's private lab is constructed, he oversees its transportation there, unknowingly being tailed by Crowley and his minder Deacon Tyrone.

Kincaid's niece Suzanne, believing that his psychic link is actually a delusion brought on by the trauma of her father's death, attempts to kill the snake by secretly increasing the temperature of its container to a lethal 150 degrees.

Picking up an assault rifle, he searches the grounds but is repeatedly struck by more and more intense visions of the snake's previous kills, losing his gun in the process.

Writers Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan wrote the novel Death Bite in 1979 to cash in on the success of Peter Benchley’s Jaws in the hopes that their novel would likewise be turned into a feature film.

According to Monahan, Erlichman was fond of optioning screenplays on spec, and had file cabinets filled with the works of many anxious writers seeking to hit it big.

Having done nothing with the ‘’Death Bite’’ property in the interim, and only a couple months remaining on his option, Erlichman sought to take advantage of the tax breaks afforded in Canada's film industry at that time.

When filming finally started, original production studio Filmpro Limited went bankrupt less than a week in, and banking firm Cinequity Corporation took over bringing two inexperienced men on board as producers.

Fearing the film would fail to stand-out among the trend of “animal attack” movies coming out at the time, Cinequity rewrote the script to add supernatural elements, replaced the wrangled snakes with animatronics, and brought on-board director William Fruet in May 1981.

Originally six different snakes—each performing its own function—were to be built, but with a limited amount of money and time constraints, this idea was scrapped and doing as much as possible with a single mechanical snake was considered more feasible.

While filming commenced in Canada, Mendez and his small crew of six built their robot monster in New York in autonomy over the course of eight weeks between August and October 1981.

The gore effects, including the graphic results of the snake's bite, were designed and realized by Academy Award-winning makeup artists Dick Smith and Stephan Dupuis, and featured heavily the former's signature air bladder technique.

Despite the impressive nature of the finished product, Fruet was unsatisfied with how it looked on-screen when interacting with the live actors, and limited its appearance in the final film through the use of POV shots and quick edits.