Another day, another teen horror – but at least this one's not as awful as some of the lunk-headed junk that's been greenlit as of late (THE FOG remake, anyone? I thought not). VENOM is an exceedingly predictable story involving a man who's possessed by a number of evil souls which proceed to make him wreak havoc amongst a group of good-natured teenagers. Yep, it's another lame excuse for yet another slasher movie, one that even manages to shy away from the gore scenes despite an 'R' rating.So why DIDN'T I hate this film as much as some others? The setting, for one; I think Louisiana is criminally underused in the cinema, as it always makes for a great, Gothic backdrop. Of course, there's the voodoo mumbo-jumbo stuff thrown into the brew here, which is another predictable cliché, but I can live with that. Another reason this film isn't bad is that it gets down to business right away, with only the minimum of moronic teen talk before the plot hits home. What follows is a pared-down thriller as a dwindling number of teenagers use anything in their path – including trucks, fire, black magic, you name it – to try and stop the unstoppable killer.The casting hurts this, because there's nobody of note here – other than Agnes Bruckner, who followed up her performance in this with one in THE WOODS, another supernatural horror co-starring (yay!) Bruce Campbell. Bruckner's filmed to look good in a figure-hugging tight top, so at least she gives the viewer something to look at. As for the killer, he's a bit of a disappointment – a chain-wielding zombie type who's almost a cross between Freddy Krueger and Ghost Rider! There are a (few) well handled scare sequences with this rampaging ghost-possessed killer, largely towards the end, and the pay-off actually works for once. I could have done without the clumsy CGI snakes and the silly final shot, but for the most part, VENOM is par for the course for modern-day horror: not particularly good, not particularly bad, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.

A pack of teenagers run for their lives through the swamps of Louisiana, as they are chased by Mr. Jangles, a man possessed by thirteen evil souls who is relentless in his pursuit of new victims. Agnes Bruckner stars a year before her great break in "The Woods" (2006).The film marks the re-teaming of Kevin Williamson, writer of "Scream", and director Jim Gillespie from "I Know What You Did Last Summer". Kyle Smith wrote, "Even the undemanding high schoolers the film is aimed at will experience déjà voodoo, as Venom recites the A through Z of horror clichés. All hopes for suspense and plot twists are snuffed out about as quickly as the film's black characters." Smith, of course, is right. Despite the great writer-director pairing, this is a complete dud with none of the charm we saw in their other work.As a historical note, this was the last Dimension film to be distributed by Disney before the former left Miramax Films to become part of The Weinstein Company in 2005.

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.

If the purpose in making VENOM was to create a new franchise, it obviously didn't work. A nasty-looking maniac full of evil spirits pursues a bunch of youths through the Louisiana swamps. He kills them in various, blood-drenched ways. Probem is, the killer is uninteresting and we've seen better kills in a half-dozen other slasher flicks. So VENOM became a one-off. The final confrontation, between a young woman (Bruckner) and the reptilian killer was a lift from both JASON and FREDDY films, although here it seems to take forever here. For true believers only. Oh, and fans of big, ugly CGI snakes, which have something to do with the creation of the killer (see the movie).