Coming to DVD Tuesday, June 2nd
Cast:
Luke Perry as Lt. Comdr. James OâNeill
Krista Allen as Dr. Andrea Swanson
Tom Berenger as Admiral Bradley Wallace
Louis Mandylor as Jake Goldin
John L. Curtis as Lt. Comdr. Houston Davies
Directed by Fred Olen Ray
Review:
Obviously by the cover art you’ve probably already guessed what Silent Venom is all about: Yep, snakes on a sub.
A real boring, very tiny sub with only a handful of rooms that get used over and over again but with different props.
By all intents, Silent Venom is a made-for-Sci Fi Channel movie. Actually, it is worse than that, if that is even possible – no offense to some of the hard-working directors out there that actually had some of the few decent projects on its “Scariest Night of the Week” franchise. It is funny because given the lack of harsh language, violence and blood or gore, it looks like it was made for TV. But this is straight-to-DVD.
But before we begin out little snakes on a little sub journey, we are introduced to Dr. Andrea Swanson (Feast‘s Krista Allen â who still looks smoking hot even after years of playing Emmanuelle back in the day), who is gathering radioactive snakes on a small island near China where there may or may not have been nuclear testing. These snakes are highly aggressive we learn and are growing at an immense rate. Needless to say, the U.S. military wants to study them in order to learn if they can come up with a vaccine that will make soldiers immune to chemical and biological attacks.
The only problem is that her assistant, Jake Goldin (Louis Mandylor, yep the brother of the Saw franchise’s Costas “COOOOOOSTTASSSSS” Mandylor, and a dead ringer for him except a bit more twitchy and squirrely), has other plans. He wants to sell the snakes to make a quick (and large) buck.
Meanwhile, 90210‘s (the original) Luke Perry shows up as disgraced sailor Lt. Comdr. James O’Neill that gets tasked with transporting an aging sub to Japan in order to retire the vessel. He is given the gig as the last way out to getting an honorable discharge thanks to his buddy Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom Berenger). Berenger looks absolutely terrible. He’s a history lesson on how not to age in Hollywood and gain so much weight that if you didn’t read his name in the credits you wouldn’t know it was him. But that’s another story.
When the Chinese begin a naval training session, Perry’s aging sub is the only one near the island where Swanson and Goldin are conducting their experiments and they are called in to pick up the two and transport them to Japan and safety. But again, Goldin has other plans and brings 20-plus snakes on board the sub.
And you guessed it again, they get out and begin to create havoc all over the vessel. I was dying for someone to say “Get these mother f**king snakes, off my mother f**king sub.” Or since Silent Venom seems like it was originally planned for television first, “Get these monkey fighting snakes, off my Monday-to-Friday sub.” Thanks to YouTube and the FX Channel (do a Google search).
Through the course of an hour and 20 minutes, we get an assload of camera shots of snakes crawling on the sub floor, through sub containers, through sub pantries, through sub duffel bags, name it, they are crawling through it. I guess they had to try to build suspense somehow. Seriously, they must have filmed three dozen shots of snakes just crawling in various areas of inside the four rooms of the sub. Will it be the red snake this time? Or the big snake? Will it be the green garden snake or the one with wide scales? You could make a nice drinking game with it.
And, of course, let’s not discount the ole snakes under the blanket (shocking!), snakes crawling next to a foot (scary), snakes in the bed (oh noes!), snakes in the shower (frightening) and snakes in the engine manifold (spooky!). No worries, there aren’t any shots of the snakes on the periscopes, mostly because all of the footage of the subs is from canned military films and that would require some semblance of a budget.
Add a dash of awkward sexual tension, some really bad acting from Perry and the numerous nameless actors involved and lines such as “Women in a sub…it just isn’t natural” or “Snakes…I hate ’em,â and you have one of the worst horror films I’ve seen in years â maybe ever.
Extras:
There are no extras. I guess when you start with a budget line of zero, you can’t really work in those pesky behind-the-scenes featurettes.
