"Ingmar Bergman comes very close to camp in this 1977 study of life (or lack thereof) in the decaying Berlin of the 20s—how else to take exchanges like 'Go to hell!' 'Where do you think we are?' David Carradine and Liv Ullmann suffer mightily and at length, but the unmitigated anguish has no shape or substance, apart from pointing out that Nazis and their progenitors were not nice people. To that extent, it's simply exploitative."

"Whether stimulated by his brush with the Swedish tax-man or his brief self-imposed exile in West Germany, Bergman's paranoia runs dementedly and tediously out of control in this Grand Guignol recreation of 1923 Berlin as studio set for close encounters of the most portentous kind. Carradine is improbably cast in the central role of a Jewish trapeze artist called Abel Rosenberg, wandering innocently through a night-town world of bottles, brothels, and (inevitably) cabarets, and trying to ignore the violence, depravity and anti-semitism screeching at him from every street corner. The torments he endures, with a sadly miscast Ullmann (who's further afflicted with throwaway lines like 'I can't stand the guilt'), have indeed been devised by a foresighted mad scientist straight out of Dr. Strangelove. This last-reel revelation comes too late to restore audience disbelief to its proper state of suspension."

"If I had created the city of my dreams, a city that does not exist and never has, and yet manifests itself acutely with smells and loud sounds, if I had created that city, not only would I have been moving in it with total freedom and an absolute sense of belonging but also, more important, I would have brought the audience with me into an alien but secretly familiar world. In The Serpent's Egg, however, I ventured into a Berlin that nobody recognized, not even I."