Screaming, stalking, and exsanguinating is just about all there is to VENOM, a putrid bit of bad filmmaking whose only virtue, and that is an extremely relative term here, is that it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything but. Alas, in the process it manages to make mere schlock look good.
We, like the female lead, Eden (Agnes Bruckner) are trapped in a backwater town in Louisiana where nothing much ever happens besides drunken swimming parties and unfortunate run-ins with voodoo. The former, Eden and her interchangeably bland fellow teens know all about. The latter is about to rear its ugly head in the person of Ray Sawyer, the father of one of the bland bunch. He’s killed by a mess of snarky snakes who aren’t just reptiles, they’re, well, that would be telling. Suffice to say that Ray is dead only in the technical sense. In the non-technical sense, he’s on a rampage to kill everyone in sight with his weapon of choice, a crowbar and a length of chain. Since this is a universe populated exclusively with good looking teens and a few not unattractive adults, those are his prey. There’s no point in going into any detail about any of them, the script thinks of them as fodder and nothing more and so there’s no point in anyone else ascribing anything better to them. Except for Cece (Meagan Good), whose grandmother was a voodoo high priestess and whose function in the story is to explain that the troubles they’re all facing can be traced back to a suitcase full of evil. Seriously. A suitcase.
All the clichés are present, the spooky old house mildewing into nothingness in the middle of the swamp, the bones, bells, and nasty things in bottles that make up the usual low-rent movie version of voodoo paraphernalia, and, of course, the ritual involving knives and magic powders. The lackluster direction exquisitely accentuates the rudimentary acting skills exhibited by the rest of the cast, which includes Jonathan Jackson, who has had professional work before this in projects that were more expensive to produce than the $1.50 this one seems to have cost. As for the writing, let me put it this way, the semi-decayed Ray stumbles towards a passel of teens and they just stand there until one of their number yells at them to run, which they do as though the thought hadn’t occured to them before. And that, film fans, is the level of refinement and sophistication to be found here. This is a story in which the writers have taken the most hackneyed parts of other bad horror films and strung them together into something that is much, much worse than the sum of its parts. That it ends up in both a steamy swamp AND a cavernous crypt does nothing to rev things up in this hopeless morass that has all the exuberance of damp lint and even less imagination.
Under the best of circumstances, VENOM would have been a risible effort that would quickly sink like a rusty anchor in a deep bayou. That it is being released less than three weeks after the area in which it is set was devastated by Hurricane Katrina is nothing short of offensive. Sending that area’s charities the box office take, plus that amount matched by the studio and a heartfelt note of apology from same might start to mitigate the situation. Holding, even canceling, the release altogether, though, would have been the right thing to do and why no one thought of that, I cannot fathom.
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