Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 16, 2005, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Dimension’s retitling of Backwater to The Reaper to Venom seems pretty haphazard, with the posters (erroneously) suggesting that the latter moniker is also that of the film’s villain, perhaps attempting to lure unwary comics fans into thinking it’s a Spider-Man spinoff. Among those previous titles, Backwater hints at the movie this might have been: a spooky, swamp-set tale of the occult rife with deep, dark Southern lore. But it’s The Reaper that reflects the movie it is: a banal teen stalker flick in which the black-magic trappings are largely window dressing. And what a shame that it comes from producer Kevin Williamson, who also apparently had a heavy hand in the scripting and, once upon a time, adroitly skewered the youth-horror clichés that Venom wholeheartedly embraces. This is the kind of creaker that the kids in Scream would have laughed right off the screen.
Set in a magical Louisiana town where nobody speaks with a Southern accent, Venom centers on two blonde friends, played by Agnes Bruckner and Laura Ramsey, who are indistinguishable even to those of us who admired Bruckner’s breakout performance in Blue Car. One of their pals, Sean (D.J. Cotrona), is estranged from his father, scarred tow-truck driver Ray (Rick Cramer)—but their relationship gets a whole lot worse after Ray tries to rescue an elderly voodoo priestess from an auto wreck. He winds up trapped in her car as it plunges into a river, and deadly snakes the woman was carrying in a suitcase spring out to attack him. A lengthy underwater shot looking into the sinking car from outside as the serpents attack Ray is Venom’s only moment of real panache, as Jim Gillespie’s direction is otherwise too reliant on ear-splitting musical stingers and stuttery visual gimmicks.
Those snakes, we learn, were used by the priestess to milk evil from the souls of the dying, and now that they’ve attacked Ray, he comes back looking much the worse for wear. Stalking around resembling Jason from the later Friday the 13th sequels, or chasing his victims in his rusty ol’ truck just like the Creeper in the Jeepers Creepers movies, he begins bumping off the young cast, starting with guest rapper-turned-actor Method Man in a scene echoing Johnny Galecki’s death in Gillespie and Williamson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. Having honored the long tradition of killing the black guy first, Ray then continues by dispatching the most annoying girls and then the gay character before moving in on the ones we’re supposed to really care about.
But that’s not easy when they’re the kind of dolts who stand there watching the killer advance instead of fleeing for their lives, and have to constantly encourage each other to “Come on!” and “Run!” My favorite line is spoken after Cece (Meagan Good), the priestess’ granddaughter, spends several minutes delivering exposition about occult practices, then states that creating a doll might help them. “You mean a voodoo doll?” one of the blondes responds.
The filmmakers try to prove they know more about that old black magic via both the dialogue and the totem-strewn production design—and to be fair, that and the Louisiana locations do lend Venom a touch of the intended atmosphere. But the mythical trappings don’t inform the story in any meaningful way; they’re just a different method by which this particular teen-killer is created and by which he might be destroyed. Nor does the film take advantage of the dramatic possibilities inherent in one of Ray’s targets being his own son. Instead it becomes just another backwoods body-counter that plays like an imitation of an imitation—i.e., a knockoff of the last half-decade’s films that have sought to evoke the spirit of ’70s horror cinema.
In that sense, Venom is a sad way for Dimension to close out its years under the Disney umbrella, a little less than a decade after Scream transformed the company into a player and helped make the box-office landscape safe for horror again. It’s understandable that Dimension and Williamson, as well as Gillespie, would want to mine the same territory that paid off so successfully before, but Venom proves only that it’s high time for them all to move on to fresher pastures.
