Critic's Grade: D-

Frank's film tip: VENOM doesn't add much of a poisonous bite to this silly-minded Southern backwoods snake-charming slasher flick

Venom is indeed a horror show but for other reasons entirely. Considerably meager and dubiously dull in its hair-raising high jinks, this brain-dead boofest is just another colorless creepy tale right off the conveyor belt of sluggish imagination. Director Jim Gillespie (I Know What You Did Last Summer) sinks so low in crafting what perhaps is one of the year's most woefully staid supernatural spectacles to emerge on the big screen. It's so baffling to believe that Gillespie and producer Kevin Williamson (the mastermind behind the enormously popular Scream movie franchise) would attach their names and creative juices to such a stillborn fright fable.

Not only does Venom conjure up images of a gloriously horrendous slasher freak festival it's guilty of bad timing as well. The earlier arrival of Iain Softley's lukewarm southern nail-biter The Skeleton Key had already invaded the corrosive consciousness of Louisiana's backwoods beguilement. Now, Gillespie wants to mine the same territorial tactics in his belligerent bayou voodoo vehicle that certainly lacks the style and substance of Softley's slight ghostly gumption.

If anything, both Gillespie and Williamson are consistent in their bid to typically use terrorized teens as the playful bait for the hazardous happenings to predictably occur. The setting takes place in the small Louisiana town aptly labeled Backwater. There, a possessed tow-truck driver named Ray (Rick Cramer)--who's a chosen victim that succumbed to various snake bites from ritualistic crawling critters belonging to a local voodoo priestess--cannot help his uncontrollable demonic urges to go out and randomly kill innocent folks. The "evil forces" within the crowbar-carrying psycho are too strong to resist. So who will step in and put an end to this macabre maniac Ray's bloodthirsty antics?

Unfortunately, a bunch of vulnerable teens are standing in the way of the murderous madman's destructive wrath. The ravaging Ray is an unstoppable slaughtering entity and is impervious to all sorts of weaponry attacks. However, he looks forward to torturing the elusive youngsters that include bickering lovebirds Eden (Agnes Bruckner) and Eric (Jonathan Jackson). For now, hiding out in one of the crew's late grandmother's place is safe for the time being. In fact, Cece (Meagan Good) managed to conveniently pick up a trick or two from her dearly departed voodoo priestess grandmother that may conveniently be useful in combating the rampaging Ray. And as some of these teen targets continue to get plucked left and right, the script enthusiastically engages in more senseless silliness that deems this whole fruitless frightfest laughably moronic.

For what it's worth, Venom does contain an atmospheric sleepy vibe that sparkles with an occasional nightmarish outrageousness. However, the silly-minded sensationalistic moments are undermined by the cheap-looking production values that couldn't effectively rival Michael Jackson's 80's "Thriller" music video. Plus, the featured teens in peril are faceless pawns that are lazily put in the line of fire without demonstrating any sense of distinction or character development whatsoever. Hence, their fate in the sketchy plot becomes inconsequential and meaningless because the audience hasn't invested any particular interest in their transparent welfare. For once, we actually root for the reckless Ray to butcher these pesky pests just to eliminate how arbitrary and thinly veiled these doomed protagonists are truly realized.

Overall, Venom has the considerable impact of a senile rattlesnake with tooth decay. Outlandishly choppy and scarcely conceived, Williamson's southern fried produced zombie flick sits there as uneventfully flat as a bowl of stale grits while triggering an embarrassing smirk from its weary viewer. Unlike some of its contemporary creepy counterparts, Venom doesn't seem to have the common decency to not take itself so seriously. Even when going through the chaotic motions as yet another cheesy teen scene horror movie, this banal bloodbath is incapable of keeping up with the perfunctory and formulaic overtones of a tiring and repetitive slash-and-dash genre.

Frank rates this film: * and a half stars (out of 4 stars)

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