Stanley (1972)

Starring Chris Robinson, Alex Rocco, Steve Alaimo, Susan Carroll, Mark Harris
Directed by William Grefe
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

After returning from a tour of duty and finding his father dead, a young man isolates himself from people and collects snakes to be his friends, which will become his instruments of vengeance.

Florida filmmaker William Grefe creates a lot of trauma for his main character played by Robinson, a half-white/half Native American, tormented by racism and his role in Vietnam and the cruelties of his former employer (Rocco), a man whose clothing factory is built on harvesting snakeskins.  This is all meant to simmer and build until he's pushed too far, as in a number of post-Vietnam character studies, but the film moves very very slowly and has a rather bizarre postscript in which Robinson kidnaps Rocco's daughter and plans to make her his Eve in a new garden of Eden, populated by snakes.  I can't say I enjoyed the film, but it is technically proficient and the behind-the-scenes snake wrangling is excellent, although we never really see the snakes attack and there's a number of jarring cuts to a snake suddenly in mid-bite or completely after one.  Grefe virtually remade the same story, albeit with sharks instead of snakes, in his later film Mako: Jaws Of Death.