Early this past summer, around the time Hollywood's 2007 blockbusters were set to make their debut on the big screen, movie junkies could find a film that might, at first glance, have been confused with the box office hit ''Transformers.'' Set in a dystopian future that looks suspiciously like an abandoned parking lot, ''Transmorphers'' tells the story of a war between humans and an evil race of extraterrestrial machines. Unlike its namesake, ''Transmorphers'' has no recognizable actors, no merchandising tie-ins and a garbled sound mix. Also unlike ''Transformers,'' it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians. In short, though ''Transmorphers'' features the occasional shape-shifting robot, it bears little resemblance to Michael Bay's big-screen phenomenon.

Yet ''Transmorphers'' had its own kind of success, earning back its meager production costs in less than three months. Created by a company called the Asylum, ''Transmorphers'' was only the latest in a string of cheaply made straight-to-DVD ''mockbusters.''

Well, TMZ is not the only assault on Hollywood`s way of life. There`s something worse. It`s called the Mockbuster, as in mock Blockbuster. It`s a cheap send-up of a Hollywood hit done by wannabe filmmakers on a shoestring budget. It`s outrageous because passing off cheesy recycled material as art should be reserved for only the big movie studios.

Where "Snakes on a Plane" stars Samuel L. Jackson as a U.S. marshal coping with venom at 20,000 feet, "Snakes on a Train" features the much lower-profile Alby Castro (who?) in a yarn about snakes unleashed by a "Mayan curse" aboard a Los Angeles-bound train from Mexico.

"Snakes on a Train" is the seventh in a series of low-budget, direct-to-video "mockbusters" over the past year designed to ride the coattails of big-budget studio releases like "The War of the Worlds," "King Kong" and "The Da Vinci Code."