31 Horror Movies in 31 Days: Venom

Venom (2005)

Directed by Jim Gillespie

Starring Agnes Bruckner, Jonathan Jackson, Laura Ramsey, D.J. Cotrona, Meagan Good, Pawel Szajda, Bijou Phillips, Davetta Sherwood, & Method Man

A creole woman driving through a small Louisiana town is carrying some sinister cargo. She’s transporting a briefcase that’s got something slithering around inside, something supernatural. When her car goes over the edge of a bridge, a local tow truck driver races to help her. His efforts are for not, as the car falls into the water below. The teens who witnessed the accident and their friends barely have time to process the event before people start turning up dead. It looks like the tow truck driver returned from the fall a different man. That briefcase was filled with snakes used in voodoo rituals that purified the souls of bad men. All their evil was retained in those snakes and now it’s retained in a tall, incredibly strong, murderous voodoo zombie.

Venom got a bad first weekend because it had the unfortunate luck of being 1) a late summer release, and 2) a movie set in the swamps of Louisiana right after Hurricane Katrina. It’s not some long hidden gem or a movie robbed of its place in horror history, but it’s pretty entertaining for the most part. I like that Venom is following the Friday the 13^th model of an undead murder machine based near a body of water, but with a distinctly regional twist. The setting makes the idea seem slightly less stale and even makes the movie a little fun. The bayou and voodoo make the unstoppable supernatural slasher movie model a little more flavorful.

The movie uses a good deal of special effects and for the most part they look good. The practical and makeup effects are good enough. They even get to showcase some gnarly deaths, like a lady getting crushed by a car and then having her face sand-blasted into the next scene. The look of Ray Sawyer, the voodoo zombie antagonist, is very grimy and gray. It’s a bit minimalist by slasher movie standards, but it works. The only problem with the effects comes from the CGI snakes that appear occasionally. The age and cost of the graphics are very noticeable, but luckily the snakes don’t slither by all that often.

The cast of young, pretty people does a good job with the material. The only standout is Meagan Good, who shows a pretty good range as the granddaughter of the old woman and the source of the film’s voodoo exposition. Good has made a career of turning in decent performances in occasionally sub-par movies only to (spoiler alert) get brutally offed before the credits. Method Man also has a slightly funny and very brief turn as the town Deputy.

Overall, Venom is an okay little slasher movie. There are parts that drag and it’s not going to be remembered as a great movie, but it is mostly entertaining without doing anything really wrong. Consider this a solidly lukewarm endorsement.

6 out of 10