Jim Gillespie re-teams with Kevin Williamson (the duo brought us 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) for this tale of teenage voodoo in the swamps of Louisiana.
When town creep/tow truck driver Ray Sawyer is involved in a car accident on a bridge with voodoo priestess Miss Emmie, the man tries to save her. As he lifts her from her car she begs him to get the suitcase on the back seat, but it bursts open and the car falls over the bridge as Ray is bitten to death by the venomous snakes that had been contained within.
When Ray’s body, along with that of the Coroner and the Deputy disappear, and one of the local kids sees Ray’s old tow truck near the cemetery, the teens of Backwater become suspicious. It soon transpires that the snakes had been used for numerous milking rituals, and that Ray has been filled with the venom of countless evil souls and is now motivated to kill for sacrificial reasons. The kids who teased Ray mercilessly now face a very deadly threat in the swamps of Louisiana.
Being that I’m a huge slasher fan, I was dying to see this, so spent most of the day trying to find a copy.
The film starts out pretty slowly, introducing us to the characters before the inciting incident takes place and from then on in, it’s a fast paced little shocker with plenty blood, guts and gore to keep horror fans happy.
The film clocks in at roughly 80 minutes so there isn’t much time for story development, but we get all we need to know minus the fat. The cast are very good with some familiar indie actors playing the teens, and the villain is kind of creepy too.
It is evident when watching the film that studio involvement had something to do with the way this turned out. Dumped on 500 screens stateside last year to fulfill contract obligations, Venom received mainly positive reviews but no-one can find the damn movie anywhere to see it!
OVERALL SUMMARY
2005 was not a good year for Kevin Williamson with this and Cursed being butchered by the studios, and poor Jim Gillespie has suffered this treatment before with 2002’s D-Tox. Give Venom a chance and you may be pleasantly surprised. It’s not the best or most original film ever, but it’s a great throwback to the heyday of 80’s horror.
