Venom
The marketers of ''Venom" would like to remind you that this horror movie is directed by Jim Gillespie (''I Know What You Did Last Summer") and produced by Kevin Williamson (writer of that Gillespie effort and ''Scream"). They hope this will distract you from the stupidity of the film's crowbar-wielding swamp-monster plot.
''Venom," written by Brandon Boyce (''Apt Pupil," ''Wicker Park") and video game creators Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten, is so far beneath comparisons to ''Scream" and ''I Know What You Did" that it would have to add a Jennifer Love Hewitt cameo just to keep company with the worst sequels of those popular movies.
If you must know the premise: A voodoo priestess who's been (don't laugh) ''milking" very bad men of their most atrocious evils accidentally releases those spirits in a car wreck, along with a battered suitcase full of snakes. The murderous vipers then slither into the corpse of a greasy tow-truck driver, turning him into a zombie maniac stalking the Louisiana bayou, apparently on a mission to make its denizens fear the sound of jangling keys.
Agnes Bruckner (''Blue Car") plays Eden, the good girl with plans to attend college in New York, and Jonathan Jackson (TV's ''General Hospital") is Eric, the puppy-faced ex-boyfriend who's miffed that she's moving on. After the possessed truck driver (Rick Cramer) brutally eliminates a few bumbling authority figures and highly dispensable pretty young things, he picks a fight with Eden and Eric, who are by this point holed up in a remote safe house along with the voodoo priestess's granddaughter (Meagan Good) and a couple more friends who can still look attractive while being dismembered or impaled.
Method Man plays a deputy, which couldn't matter less.
If ridiculous, hackneyed, gratuitously violent slasher movies aren't your thing, don't go near ''Venom" with a 10-foot snake pole. And if they are your thing, note that this is loaded with lazy contrivances and dead ends that should annoy any horror fan who's been paying attention for one or more of the last several decades.
The creepiest thing here is the moist Louisiana landscape, which even in sunshine is naturally more ominous than anything manufactured by special effects or script. It therefore seems particularly unfortunate that ''Venom" comes out immediately in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when real-life horrors are so plentiful in the region. But hey, why pause for questions of taste?
Those who come looking for humor may find some in the dialogue and editing; just take into consideration that, unlike ''Scream" and ''I Know What You Did," ''Venom" is the kind of movie you laugh at instead of with. For starters, those filmmaking credentials are a pretty good joke.
Janice Page can be reached at jpage22@hotmail.com.
Video
