I know what director Jim Gillespie did last summer... he made this crappy voodoo themed slasher movie that ended-up flopping in theatres. Hired by Dimension on the commercial success of his 1997 flick, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Gillespie certainly tries his best to keep Venom interesting looking and briskly paced, it's just too bad that Dimension and co-producer Kevin Williamson (who's best known for writing 1996's Scream) were more interested in trying to make a new horror icon in the vein of Freddy than to actually make an effort to make the movie more than a second rate flick that tries too hard to have a "cool" villain.

Agnes Bruckner plays Eden, a small town girl who's dreaming of going away to school to become a doctor while keeping a job as a waitress. She's just gone through an awkward split with boyfriend Eric (Jonathan Jackson), but things are about to get a lot worse for her, Eric, and a bunch of her friends when she witnesses a late night accident where creepy tow truck driver Ray (Rick Cramer) is stung by voodoo enhanced snakes when he tries to save a local women when he car threatens to plunge into the river.

The snakes venom ends-up killing Ray, but thanks to the spell on them he returns from the dead as a quite pissed off zombie-like killer who goes on a killing spree of any 20-something cast member that gets in his way while Eden and Eric try to figure out a way to stay alive and stop the constantly evolving undead Ray.

The main thing that's frustrating about Venom, apart from it's lack of ambition to be anything more than a "line-them-up-kill-them-off" slasher flick, is that fact it's so light on plot that scripters Flint Dille, John Zour Platten, and Brandon Boyce don't even really bother to explain why all this is happening. They even throw in a character named CeCe (Megan Good) to try and explain what's going on and give it a mystical angle (seems the old lady was her grandma), but it's such a wimpy explanation and Good is such a bad actress all we can do as a viewer is sigh loudly.

Sure, Venom trots out a bunch of bloody murder sequences (there's one pretty cool scene involving a chain through a window), but it doesn't ever bother developing any of the characters and Gillespie tosses out a last third that's filled with crappy voodoo doll and house ripping silliness as well as a baddie that's inhabited by poorly done CGI snakes and is given a particularly bad demise before we get one lousy set-up for a sequel (which, thankfully, probably won't happen).

This just fails to make any sort of impression, instead resigning itself to being a lazily made horror flick that relies too much on death scenes to carry it. It also doesn't help that most of the cast aren't very convincing, with the female members of the cast especially weak with their multiple screams and overdone looks of fright. (Chris Hartley, 7/21/06)

Directed By: Jim Gillespie.
Written By: Flint Dille, John Zour Platten, Brandon Boyce.

Starring: Agnes Bruckner, Jonathan Jackson, Laura Ramsey, Brandon Boyce.