It’s all too fitting that this maddeningly indecisive horror potboiler should slink into theatres in the midst of both the film industry’s traditional season for casting out unwanted or orphaned productions and a catastrophic bout of national malaise. Hurricane Katrina’s misbegotten obliteration of the Big Easy notwithstanding, Venom (previously saddled with the only slightly less memorable title Backwater) is the sort of genre also-ran that in normal circumstances would have opened and sunk with barely a ripple, raising the question: Why even bother? So thoroughly mediocre on every discernible level is this film that only its hoary, backwoods Louisiana setting – sort of an evil’s bayou, if you will – and its unwitting and wholly unintentional correlation to the grim state of Gulf Coast affairs renders it anything more than a fast forgotten footnote to Miramax/Dimension’s final days. Director Gillespie helmed 1997’s enjoyably straightforward slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer from a script by Scream wunderkind Kevin Williamson (credited here amidst a list of co-producers nearly as long as his previous outing’s title), but whatever canny flair he brought to that one is absent here. A tale of supernatural vengeance that has neither the backstory (the script is credited to Apt Pupil scribe Brand Boyce and Constantine video-game co-writers Flint Dille and John Zuur Plaaten) nor the necessary tension to generate anything more chilling than the occasional yawn-induced frisson, Venom has fewer scares than an untended cemetery plot at high noon. With its reliance on disposable stock characters so interchangeable as to be downright enigmatic, Venom’s voodoo-inflected plot is less a contrivance than a slap in the face to the memory of Marie Laveau and and her ilk. What there is of it involves the requisite gaggle of teens led by Bruckner’s vivacious Eden who, thinking past the Spanish moss that envelops the film, pines for a life beyond the swamplands of rural Louisiana. Diversion of a sort arrives when local white-trashy mechanic Ray (Cramer) is killed – and then resurrected – by a hoodoo-filled suitcase overflowing with squirmy, soul-sucking snakes. Unceremoniously possessed by the restless spirits of 13 bayou creepsters, Ray stalks Eden and her coterie of proto-hipster decedents-to-be through the bayou muck as “Mr. Jangles,” an appellation unlikely to strike fear in the heart of anyone not named Bo Dylan. There’s a brief attempt made to explain the story’s voodoo underpinnings – Megan Good’s character Cece is apparently the granddaughter of the local high priestess – but even by the logistically malleable standards of the horror genre, Venom lacks even the barest rudiments of the form, eschewing genuine, if cheap, scares over lazy chemi-fog atmospherics and a shambling killer so uninteresting he makes Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees look like George Plimpton by comparison.
This article appears in December 2 • 2005.