Every year brings new entries into the ‘we want to build a horror franchise and rake in the easy money’ sweepstakes, hoping to be the new Saw, Hostel, Paranormal or Nightmare on Elm Street. Even Wrong Turn would be acceptable.
Most – practically all – suck. Consider The Collector, Hatchet, Jeepers Creepers and practically every sequel to those listed above in the successful categories.
Venom is merely another aspirant out of its depth like the slightly awkward girl at cheerleader try outs. You can’t hate it for making the effort, you just feel sorry that it ever felt it had a chance…
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What sounds worse to you, drowning or being attacked by a dozen snakes? What about both at once? And while we’re there can I perhaps upsell you to a dozen voodoo snakes inhabited by the tortured spirits of serial killers and other equally loathsome individuals?
That’s what happens to poor old Ray.
When local creepy guy Ray and the local eccentric voodoo lady die in the same freak accident, one is buried and mourned, the other goes missing before an autopsy can be performed. Within hours so too does everyone in the small town that is able to work an i-pad without looking at the manual.
Here is a film like one of the poor chaps in Beauty and the Geek, it has all the right ingredients – killer snakes, voodoo, zombified murderers – it just has no idea what to do with them.
Consider that an hour into the film one of the pretty vacant teens thinks it necessary to inform the others that there is a voodoo undercurrent at work here. Wait, wasn’t that kinda obvious from… oh let’s say minute #1? Obvious that is to anyone but the morons inhabiting this film, morons who somehow manage to one by one separate themselves from the pack for just long enough to be killed in many varied ways only similar due to their uniform lack of creativity.
These films are all about the inventiveness of the kills, the identity and charisma of the threat and the attractiveness of the tight t-shirt fillers. The only kill worthy of referencing is when a girl is ‘treed’ at one of those t junctions that only exist in horror movies. The killer is a shuffling zombie filled with terrible (laughable really) computer generated snakes who marks his victims with an ‘s’.
Probably for ‘snake’…
And the t-shirt fillers are all faceless and equally adequate, with the same interchangeable pointless comments. Once they all huddle together in the same voodoo protected shack while Ray saunters about menacingly outside just waiting for another to run off by themselves, you kinda hope that he saw enough sense to simply torch the place and walk off.
Saving us the trouble of sitting through any more of this astonishingly dull 80 minutes.
Most of all I feel sorry for Ray, at least as the town’s creepy pervert he created nervous tension and muttering among the locals as he passed by in his pick up. Once he is converted into a human piñata chick full of snakes he instantly becomes the least threatening thing on the planet. Never have I seen so many normally scary elements used in such a non-scary way.
Final Rating – 4 / 10. Perhaps the scariest thing about Venom is that it has yet to spawn an unnecessary sequel. Can it be that Hollywood are finally learning?
