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Friday, September 16, 2005
'Venom' is everything a swamp slasher should be
The timing for a Louisiana-set horror flick is hardly optimal, but otherwise this voodoo-flavored teen horror gumbo is a competent concoction of familiar ingredients, smothered with gothic mood and served up with a generous helping of teenagers: skewered, slashed and stabbed.
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View all photosSet in what must be the bayou's own Sleepy Hollow, a swamp town seemingly connected to the rest of the world by nothing more than a winding tangle of rutted dirt roads, it opens on a voodoo ritual over what appears to be a swamp grave. Instead of a casket, however, the voodoo priestess digs up a muddy suitcase.
Subsequent exposition explains the Haitian rites of "milking souls" and draining the evil from dying souls. All you really need to know is that this old case is packed with evil and hulking town creep Ray (Rick Cramer, a scar-faced, grease-covered mechanic who already looks like the walking dead) has the bad luck (and worse judgment) to be in the way when Pandora's Box snaps open and sends him on a rampage.
It's part haunted swamp slasher movie and part high-concept zombie thriller, with an undead killer that drives a tank of a tow truck, charges like a fullback and brandishes a tire-iron with dead-on precision, at least until the necessities of the plot slow him to a Frankenstein-like stumble.
Logic has never been the hallmark of the genre, and director Jim Gillespie ("I Know What You Did Last Summer") knows it. He fills the mood-drenched film with a soundtrack of ominous offscreen rattles and a steady succession of abrupt, at times exotic mayhem (check out murder by sand-blaster!). "Venom" delivers everything a teen horror audience could ask for in a brisk 85 minutes.
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