“I know that policeman, he’s a killer.”

Drake’s rating: Now in Snake-O-Vision!

Drake’s review: Phillip Hopkins is just your average American kid living in England. He’s asthmatic, has quite the animal collection up in his room, and a grandfather who was once a big game hunter.

OK, so maybe Phillip is not exactly average. But he’s still a nice kid who has a very busy mother who departs for a few days on a trip, leaving Phillip in the care of the aforementioned grandfather, Howard Anderson (Sterling Hayden, Zero Hour!) as well as Louise the maid (Susan George, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry). Which is pretty convenient for Louise since she and the chauffeur, Dave (Oliver Reed, The Three Musketeers), have conspired together to kidnap Phillip.

Man, good help is so hard to find, isn’t it?

Unfortunately Louise’s plan gets derailed a bit due to Howard sneaking the boy out under her nose so that he can pick up his newest pet. Which is supposed to be a harmless snake, but somehow the crates at the pet store got mixed up and Phillip happily returns home, unknowingly carting a black mamba into the house instead.

No, you’re right. No one is particularly good at their jobs in this movie.

The good news is that the snake strikes instantly at the person who opened the crate, which was Louise and not Phillip. She’s bitten several times in quick succession before the black mamba slithers off to have some alone time away from the noisy, screaming humans. The bad news is that the mastermind behind the kidnapping shows up, and he’s Klaus Kinski. At least, that’s bad news for everyone involved in this attempted kidnapping, since anyone who’s ever seen Kinski in a movie knows that the man was entirely comfortable playing characters who are at best highly unstable and at worst completely deranged.

Not unlike the actor himself, who could be incredibly difficult to work with. Just ask Werner Herzog.

Sill, Kinski is less psychotic as career criminal Jacques Müller that one might expect him to be. He’s cruel and lacks compassion, but never devolves into the sort of misanthropic villain that one might expect upon seeing Kinski enter the film. Instead, Müller tries to deal with having a deadly snake running around disrupting his attempted kidnapping while also keeping the cops at bay, since they showed up and cordoned off the block, trapping kidnapper, victims and snake alike in the house together.

Years* ago there was a local theater that had a “two dollar Tuesday,” which is how I saw more than a few movies at the time. I mean, it was hard to go wrong at a price point like that, right? And every so often they’d pair up a couple of flicks for a double-feature, which is how I originally saw Venom back in the early ‘80s. The thing is, I never really remembered much about it since the second feature was Alligator. That flick really stole the show and was burned into my memory, and Venom just became “that snake movie with Oliver Reed.”

Seeing Venom again recently, it’s easy to see why it was the less memorable movie. It’s actually not bad, but it is very much a suspense thriller that limps into becoming a crime drama for a bit, all while also trying to tap that eco-horror market. In other words, Venom is kind of all over the place. It’s a decidedly uneven movie with characters who make unquestionably bad decisions for absolutely no reason other than the necessity to move the plot forward.

Venom has enough firepower in the acting department to carry it across the finish line regardless of the many plot holes and contrivances, but at the same time the script is often so weak as to be distracting. Again, it’s not a bad movie and I enjoyed watching it this time around, but it just doesn’t do anything well enough to stand out in any of the many genres that it’s trying to tap into. If you want to watch a suspense film or a crime drama, then there are so many movies to choose from that handle the material better. And if you want to watch an eco-horror flick, then I could name more than a few choices that are a better fit than Venom.

Like, say, Alligator.

*Decades.

Intermission!

• Klaus Kinski turned down a role in Raiders of the Lost Ark to make Venom instead. He was offered more money for Venom, but also had some very unkind things to say to Steven Spielberg about the script for Raiders.
• And to be fair to Kinski, one of his objections was that the Nazis weren’t portrayed like the monsters they were, which I think is an understandable criticism.
• Tobe Hooper was the original director for Venom, but left during initial filming. I would think that if Hooper had stayed on, Venom would have leaned heavily into the suspense and horror aspects and quite probably been a more effective film.
• The snake’s eye view camera is a good concept, but isn’t used to good effect and as a result it comes off as kind of humorous.
• Kinski’s death scene is pretty outrageous. I have no idea if any of it was scripted, or if they just handed him a rubber snake and told him to go nuts.