This review isn’t strictly speaking of a movie shown at a Society meeting, but I watched it privately with one member recently and I have enough to say about it that it’s worth a post. The official trailer is a good representation of the movie as a whole. See it with open-minded friends and I guarantee you’ll have a good night.
Genres: Slasher, Southern Gothic
I will start by saying that this is the best horror film I’ve seen in the last five years set in the South. Specifically, the movie is set in Louisiana, and much like Chernobyl Diaries, Venom leverages its setting both effectively and artistically. The scenery in this film is as amazing as it is authentic. I grew up in the Silicon Valley, and have lived the past couple of years in Eastern Washington. Swamps were always something I fantasized about as a child (The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, anyone?), much as I did with snow (I get plenty of snow where I live now, though last winter was on the light side). I saw my first snow by the time I was nine, but I didn’t see my first real swamp until I went to Basic Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Venom showcases swamps like nothing I’ve ever seen. As I watched it, I was captivated by the rural dirt roads, and found myself marveling at what it would be like to ride my bike down those dusty tracks with the murky snake-infested water on either side of me, ready to swallow me up if I fell over (I’m from the city, okay?).
I have some relatives in Georgia, and last summer I went to visit them. We traveled to the Okefenokee Swamp, where I saw my first alligator. At the urging of a very southern tour guide, I drank some of the water. He was right. It tasted like iced tea. Apparently the conditions were perfect to create drinkable water; something about the PH level—I don’t suggest drinking from most swamps. I will never forget out experience traveling through that swamp in a boat. The noise from the trilling of the insects was deafening. Spider webs stretched dozens of feet across between trees. The water is black and oily; if you dropped a body in the water it would vanish in half a second. It was unlike any place I’d ever been.
Atmospherics are Venom’s best feature.
Venom has swamps just like that, and they aren’t just for show. The swamp encroaches on the claimed land, sidling up against roadways, overflowing its banks to caress overgrown graveyards from a more opulent time. Venom showcases the South that is old. For a California boy, history pretty much began in 1849, and there aren’t really any buildings from before 1900 except for the Spanish Missions. There just hasn’t been enough time to grow a set of ruins from a recently forgotten past still faintly remembered. This world of decaying mansions is foreign to me, and in that tenuous connection to recent history made already old is where I find the unnerving element in Southern horror.
The second thing Venom gets right is its small town feeling. Again, I grew up in an urban sprawl nearly sixty miles wide—the only way to know that you crossed the city line is that the color of the street lights changes. Everyone in the city I grew up in arrived there in the last generation. There are no lasting family legacies, curses, or houses local kids know are haunted—nobody’s been around long enough for those sorts of traditions to develop. The same is true of people. You can walk down the streets of my hometown and pass a hundred people without seeing anyone you know or who knows you. People tend to pass each other in indifferent silence, even in public places. Nobody knows each other; they just inhabit the same space.
In the Louisiana backwater Venom is set in, everyone knows everyone. The local sheriff has been there a generation, so he knows everyone, even the strange Creole woman who dies toward the beginning of the movie. He knows the victim’s granddaughter, knows where she lives, and has a close enough relationship with her that he takes her home when she arrives on the scene to find her dead grandmother. The sheriff’s deputy grew up local, and so did the deputy’s dad. These people have roots in the community. They know each other, for good or ill. The same is true of the local tow truck driver, Ray Sawyer, a grungy man with a nasty scar on his face that seems to be the cause of the harassment the local teenagers give him—based on his actual behavior, he seems like a gruff but good man. And he drives the coolest tow truck EVER. It looks like an old Army 5-ton, and I don’t think there’s been a truck in cinema this cool since Duel.
Mr. Jangles has got some kind of souped up diesel!
The movie itself isn’t that great, but it isn’t terrible either. I’d give it 3.5/5, with an extra half-point thrown in if you are a fan of Southern Gothic or enjoy swampy Southern scenery enough that the setting appeals to you.
Venom (Backwater). Dir. Jim Gillespie. Miramax, 2005. Film. IMDB Link: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428251/?ref_=tt_rec_tt>
