Samuel L. Jackson at a Loss for Words?

The marketing hype for “Snakes on a Plane” slithered to a crawl Thursday.

A promotion for the movie was temporarily grounded when fans flooded a website to try to send phone messages in which star Samuel L. Jackson urges the recipients to see his flick when it opens Aug. 18.

In the prerecorded message -- partly personalized by senders with information about the intended recipients -- an increasingly heated Jackson touts the far-fetched thriller and finally shouts: “You don’t want to mess with me on this one because I will come after you. You hear me?!”

But the actor’s booming voice was silenced by a system overload that prevented the calls from going through. In many cases, phones rang but recipients heard nothing when they answered.

“If you keep saying ‘Hello,’ it eventually says, ‘Try again later,’ ” read one posting on the Hollywood Stock Exchange website.

Marketing firm VariTalk, which created the campaign with client New Line Cinema, said 100,000 messages were sent in the first 24 hours -- far more than it expected.

VariTalk executive Frederick Lowe was working with his firm’s Internet phone providers to improve performance. He said he expected the system to be running smoothly today.

“We’ve been putting, so to speak, bigger wings on the plane as it flies,” Lowe said.