We're in front of our typical slasher film; good guy dies in a freak accident, then comes back to life turned into an evil killing machine. The plot is really simple, so I'm pretty sure you're not going to miss anything and get lost/confused in the middle of the flick.We also have our group of characters; the girl who is recovering from several traumatic experiences, the guy who's trying to win said girl's love back, the bimbo, the tough guy, the funny guy and the Regina George wannabe. It's a pretty overused formula, but in this case it works; the characters are likable and you find yourself rooting for them but at the same time, thinking about which one of them is going to get the nastiest demise next.Even though I'm not the kind of guy who gets scared by slasher movies, I did with this one. The atmosphere was great, it was dark and intriguing; the surroundings were obscure (with the exception of the party at the lagoon and the gas station scene where the girls go for some fuel), those aspects helped the movie a lot and honestly, I can't think of any other place better for the story than the swamps of Louisiana; they nailed it at this one.The killings were really gruesome (as expected), the sequences were mostly intense, like the one at the grandmother's house and the last fight between our leading lady and the villain. The acting was really good for this kind of film and the effects were nicely done; oh! and the addition of Rob Zombie's ''Two Lane Blacktop'' was good, because let's be honest, at the end of the day what is a slasher movie without rock music? All things said, it's a really entertaining flick with a good dose of gore, creepy imagery and good looking actors. If you're looking for an intelligent, mind-blowing, original kind of film, stay away from this; but if you're in it just for the blood and guts, this is for you!If you find yourself with some free time in your hands and don't know what to do, ignore the ratings and go for it! I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

I won't harp on too much about this as Venom is genuinely an unremarkable stalk and slash fare with a bit of voodoo mysticism thrown in to try and add spice to an otherwise dehydrated dish. A man gets attacked by a suitcase full of demonic snakes, comes back to life and begins a random killing spree using any means necessary until settling for a crowbar. Most of the death scenes are obviously trying to emulate some of the inventive and gruesome deaths done in the Friday the 13th movies 30 years earlier, but just seem unnecessary in this. A bunch of panicky, and mostly twenty- something pretending to be teenage cast, take refuge in a voodoo protected house until snake man finds a way to break the seal. After a few more ho-hum deaths, only one remains and with the inevitable - "he's dead now - oh no he's not" moments, our crowbar wielding villain gets crushed between a large tree stump and a tow-truck therefore rendering his body too useless to be effective as a vessel. As the torso lay across the front of the truck, 2 snakes emerge in search of some other body to inhabit. This is fairly standard fare and if you've seen any horror movie in the last 25 years then you've already seen this, you just don't realise it yet. There's no need to rent or buy this and it's one of those "only if there's nothing better on TV" movies. None of the cast is memorable, every death is forgettable and if you haven't fallen asleep before the end, you deserve some kind of reward. Venom is one for the dumpster.

Rather than letting them suffer for their sins (as would be fitting), a stupid old voodoo priestess saves the souls of murderers and sadists by 'milking them' of their evil, which emerges from the body in the form of a snake; the silly old woman buries these nasty reptiles in a suitcase in the local graveyard, but when the land is scheduled for redevelopment, she decides to dig them back up. Long story short: a local redneck gets killed by the snakes and turns into an unstoppable killing machine (well, unstoppable until he gets hit by a truck, which is the unsatisfactory manner in which he is finally destroyed by the film's final girl.A beautifully eerie backwater town on the edge of a Louisiana swamp is the atmospheric setting for this supernatural horror from director Jim Gillespie (I Know What You Did Last Summer), but with a generic cast of attractive teens, workmanlike direction, irritating editing (the image does that flickery thing whenever the killer goes to work), predictable plot development, weak CGI, unimpressive gore and zero nudity, the result is just another bland, by the numbers slasher. Not good. Not bad. Just frustratingly mediocre. The only time the film ever surprises is when a character who one might reasonably expect to live to the end gets a knife in his head; other than that, it's the same-old same-old.

I can't believe it took three people to write this movie. It shouldn't have taken even one whole person to come up with this screenplay. In this day and age, there has to be a computer program where you can load in a bunch of horror movie scripts and have it edit out every single thing that's unique or individual about each script, until you're left with the stripped down, blunt, dry and dumb essence of the "teenagers vs. supernatural monster" story. Venom is a film that doesn't use the horror movie formula. It IS the horror movie formula.I can't imagine there's much point is trying to relate the plot of this thing. t's teenagers being chased and killed in a swamp by a zombie. Not a Romero Zombie, though. This is a voodoo zombie. And it's not just any voodoo zombie, this is like a super-zombie who can run and swim and drive a truck. But when the script requires it, he's still dumb enough to be utterly stymied by a simple metal gate.This story is as basic as you can get. There's no twist, there's no self-aware irony, there's no effort to break new ground in gore or perversity, there's not even an attempt to explore the subject of voodoo as anything more than the particular gimmick of this movie. If you've seen any other "teenagers getting killed" horror movie, you've already seen everything in Venom. Except for naked boobs. There are no naked boobs in Venom. I don't know how three dudes write any sort of horror movie without including at least one topless chick. Even the gayest man on Earth would know enough to include a scene with unclothed knockers in this kind of film.For all that, though, I suppose Venom isn't really that bad. Sometimes you're hungry, but you don't want a steak. You just want a fast food cheeseburger. This movie is a fast food cheeseburger. Except it doesn't have any cheese on it. Or pickles. Or ketchup. And the burger hasn't been fried. It's just been stuck under a heat lamp for 30 minutes. And the bun isn't really bread, it's some sort of processed bread substitute. So, Venom is like a lukewarm piece of cow flesh between two slabs of cardboard. Yummy.I guess there is one interesting thing about Venom. It's one of the few teen horror films you'll see where the actors are all much prettier than the actresses. Not that the young women in this movie are dogs, but they don't hold a candle to the metrosexual beauty of their male co-stars. I'm not sure what the reason for that is but like Zap Brannigan, it fills me with emotions that are weird and deeply confusing. If you have 90 minutes to kill and want to watch a horror movie that believes you can defeat a magical enemy by just hitting them hard enough, you could rent Venom. I can't actually recommend it but I can't discourage it, either. I suppose that makes this review a "push".