ust outside a small town on the Louisiana bayou, an elderly woman digs up a moldering suitcase containing a collection of poisonous snakes, which have been used to store the extracted evil of various rapists, murderers and other nasty men. Her intention is to move the dangerous package to another location, before the site is discovered by local developers. But a freak accident leaves her car hanging off the side of a bridge.
A surly, scarred, locally despised but fundamentally decent tow-truck driver named Ray (Rick Cramer) successfully pulls her out, but is trapped inside with the snakes as the car plunges to the swamp waters below. Bitten multiple times, he rises from his slab in the morgue a rotting but seemingly indestructible murderer in the Jason, Michael and Leatherface vein.
The now-soulless Ray, who reacts to every new development with a fervent "Raaaar!", kills off four people before he gets around to stalking anybody we even remotely care about. The energy level and inventiveness ratchet up quite a bit, distressingly late in the film, when he targets the elderly voodoo woman's home, by that point sheltering her granddaughter Cece (Good), med
student Eden (Bruckner) and Ray's estranged son Sean (Cotrona).
More or less predictably, Ray winnows down the survivors at regular intervals. Not so predictably, his most effective weapon is not the tire iron he buries in several skulls but his tow truck, which seems as unstoppable as the homicidal tanker from Steven Spielberg's Duel. The only good scenes involve shenanigans with the truck, which are awesome.
We do need another hero
Venom belongs to the most heartbreaking subgenre of awful movies: The kind awash with so many missed opportunities that a little tweaking could have made it something special. Those failures are so blatant that they demand examination, rather than the usual cruel mockery the film would otherwise merit.
[Spoilers follow.]
The most avoidable flaw is flabby pacing. Once we establish that Ray's gonna start killing people, why do we have to spend that half hour suffering through less-than-scary scenes of him picking off bit players, a la every other "dead teenager" movie of the past quarter century, before the 11th-hour siege of a country home that finally (and all too briefly) moves things into high gear? Some of those action sequences, especially two involving that tow truck, actually emerge as thrilling—high praise indeed in a film that is otherwise paint-by-numbers.
Worse than that, however, is the film's utter failure to recognize who its protagonists should be, preferring instead to surrender to convention and focus on the pretty, young, blond, uninteresting and, of course, white med student, Eden. Of course, she's the star. That's what she had to be, as long as the moviemakers are adhering to formula.
But what about Cece, only heir to her grandmother's voodoo secrets, who at one point uses her limited knowledge to slow Ray down? Why, aside from her color, would she die so soon, and in the expected order of casualties, when her journey would have distinguished this film from a hundred others? And what about Ray's illegitimate son, Sean? A big deal is made about his unresolved anger at his father, who has never had anything to do with him, and who (it is discovered mid-film) secretly gave a damn about him all along. Wouldn't it have been just a little bit different to make Sean a conflicted protagonist, instead of an early victim?
Of course it would have. There may not have ever been any chance of this thing ever being anything but a throwaway, dopey slasher film, but following either of these threads would have given it some distinction, maybe even made it memorable. It's just too bad the screenwriters weren't up to it, and settled for filling in the blanks in a game of Dead Teenager Mad Libs.
