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Synopsis:
In London, Ruth Hopkins (Cornelia Sharpe) frets over the prospect
of leaving her chronically asthmatic young son, Philip (Lance Holcomb),
behind when she flies to Rome to meet her wealthy businessman husband.
However, Ruth’s father, Howard Anderson (Sterling Hayden), a former
safari leader and photographer, insists that everything will be fine.
Meanwhile, as Philip tends his bedroom menagerie, the family maid,
Louise Andrews (Susan George), assures the chauffeur, Dave Connelly
(Oliver Reed), that “nothing
will go wrong”…. That evening, Dave drives Ruth to the airport. As
his employer departs, the chauffeur goes to check on the arrival of a
flight from Madrid – and is met by the sinister Jacmel (Klaus Kinski).
Dave drives Jacmel to an isolated house, where bars have been put on the
windows, and a newly obtained car waits. After Dave has left, Louise
arrives and greets Jacmel, her lover, warmly. Jacmel tells her that he
is worried about working with the nervous, unreliable Dave. Louise
promises to keep him in line. The next day, Howard and Philip conspire
together to arrange a minor adventure for the boy: a taxi-ride to an
animal importer’s to collect an African house snake ordered for
Philip’s menagerie. When she catches the boy leaving the house, Louise
becomes almost hysterical, but Howard manages to send him on his way.
Howard then gets a phonecall from a prospective employer, Mr Kepler,
offering him the chance to work on a film in Africa. Although reluctant
to leave the house until Philip returns, Howard cannot resist such an
opportunity, and agrees to an immediate meeting. Louise tries to phone
Jacmel to let him know that Philip has gone out, but Jacmel is already
making another call. Philip arrives at the importer’s shop to find
that its owner has been hospitalised, and that his eccentric wife has
been left in charge. Philip collects his snake and returns to the cab.
Meanwhile, at the London Institute of Toxicology, Dr Marion Stowe (Sarah
Miles) discovers that instead of the black mamba she ordered, she has
been sent a harmless house snake. Puzzled but unsuspicious, Marion
prepares to have lunch with her daughter – until the full implications
of the mistake strike her. Stood up by the mysterious “Mr Kepler”,
Howard heads for home. Police Sergeant Nash (John Forbes-Robertson)
receives a frantic call from Marion, who tells him that she has been in
touch with the shop, and learned that Philip has indeed been given the
mamba. When Philip arrives home he is grabbed by Louise, who tells him
that his grandfather is waiting for him at a friend’s house – and
has sent a car for him. Philip, however, insists on housing his new pet
immediately. He breaks free of the maid and rushes into the house.
Louise follows and, after another futile effort to get the boy to leave,
tries to hurry him up by offering to help with his new acquisition.
Assuming that the wooden box contains yet another of Philip’s
“little furry animals”, Louise lifts the lid….
Comments:
What, another dumb
killer snake film? Yes, indeed. Partly because I like dumb killer snake films – generally – and partly to
demonstrate that in spite of the impression I know I frequently give,
from time to time I can in
fact just kick back and enjoy a piece of mindless entertainment. Venom, as it happens, is one of my most cherished guilty pleasures.
It is one of those peculiar productions where the stories surrounding
it, and the various facets that make it up, are ultimately much more
important, and certainly much more enjoyable, than the film as a film could ever be.
You
see, here’s the thing about Venom:
it has a real black mamba in
it.
The
black mamba is in many ways the Great White shark of the snake world, if
you understand what I mean. While other snakes attack much more
frequently, and are responsible for far more human deaths (the puff
adder is, I believe, the leading cause of snake-related fatality in
Africa, mostly because it spends much of its time lying motionless, and
consequently gets stepped on quite a lot), it is the black mamba that
captures the imagination – and not without good cause. The mamba is a
big snake, slender but long; ten to twelve feet is common, but specimens
of fourteen feet have been recorded. It is one of the fastest snakes
around. While tales of it outrunning horses are myths, it can
outpace a human being on foot, at least over short distances. Like
its cousin, the cobra, a mamba will flare the skin around its neck when
making a threat display, although far less spectacularly. It also has
the remarkable ability to lift the first third of its body off the
ground, and to travel like that; it does so when it is hunting – and
when it feels threatened. A full-sized mamba, therefore, can if it so
chooses stand almost eye to eye with an adult human being, and tower
over a child. When it strikes, it tends to do so repeatedly. No snake
will attack a human being without provocation, but the mamba is easier
to provoke than most. The majority of snakes, when threatened, will look
around for a way out – any way out. A mamba, on the other hand, is
likely to decide it wants one particular way out – and if that is
blocked, it may well attack. Without treatment, mamba bite can result in
paralysis and death within twenty minutes.
The
novel “Venom” spends about a quarter, perhaps even a third, of its
length filling in the political histories of its terrorist-kidnappers.
The producers of the film Venom,
recognising that their audience was unlikely to give a toss about such
things, jettisoned all of their source’s background information, and
instead focussed their energies upon realising the most exploitable
aspect of the story: the black mamba that is inadvertently released
inside the house in which the botched kidnapping is taking place. Here I
must pause and doff my cap in stunned admiration of the decision-makers
behind this film. When Venom
was made in the early eighties, the cinematic world was in the midst of
a special effects revolution: within two years, The
Howling, An American Werewolf
In London and The Thing
were unleashed upon a disbelieving public. It would have been easy (not
to mention sensible) for the producers of Venom
to go with a combination of stock footage and animatronics, or to use
some other kind of sophisticated model. But they didn’t. (Which is not
to say there aren’t a few rubbery stand-ins in the film – but on the
whole, they’re pretty well disguised.) Instead, they rang up David
Ball, curator of reptiles at the London Zoo, and invited him to spend
some time provoking a black mamba for the benefit of their cameras.
And
then, presumably because having a real mamba on their set wasn’t
suicidally dangerous enough, they hired Klaus Kinski and
Oliver Reed.
Venom is not, by any
cinematic standard, a great film, but it is rather better – and a lot
more fun – than its reputation would lead you to believe. (It’s
better, for that matter, than my affectionate but slightly contemptuous
memories of it had led me to
believe.) The problem is, and always has been, mis-marketing; since the
beginning, this film has been sold to the wrong audience. To see what I
mean, just take a look at the newspaper ad reproduced above. Venom
is not a horror film, as its
advertising continues to insinuate. It’s not even a true killer snake
film (ditto). It’s a thriller, pure and simple, in which the snake is
simply one complicating aspect of the story. (Pardon an interjection:
the people at Blue Underground are doing an absolutely fabulous job with
their DVD releases, but whoever is responsible for the cover art of Venom
ought to be slapped. It makes the film look like a cheap knock-off of Anaconda.
Shame!) It might be true that Venom
is contrived and unbelievable, but that’s hardly a valid criticism.
The fact is, very few thrillers pass muster at the story level. Is Die
Hard credible? Is North By
Northwest? Hardly. The true art of the thriller is not to tell a convincing story, after all, but to tell an exciting and
entertaining one well enough to lure the viewer into suspending
disbelief – at least until the credits roll. On this level, Venom succeeds to a surprising extent, thanks primarily to the
efforts of a quality group of actors, all of whom put in remarkably good
performances – far better, if we’re honest, than the film actually
deserves.
Where
Venom gains what credibility
it does have is that the
audience never doubts for a moment the extent of the threat posed by the
criminal conspirators; not when they’re played by Klaus, Ollie and
Suze! The thought of a child at the mercy of that trio is genuinely
disturbing. Indeed, from the film’s opening moments, with Ollie/Dave
casting ominous glances at the young Philip in the rear-view mirror of
the Rolls Royce he is chauffeuring, the viewer is on edge. (You have to
love the Hopkinses, though, don’t you? He’s wealthy enough for his son to become the target of
kidnappers, she’s
neurotically fretful – yet they let Oliver Reed and Susan George into
their house! Yeesh! Almost makes Eric Stoltz and Jennifer Lopez’s
decision to go up the Amazon with Vincent Castellanos look sensible.)
With the arrival of Klaus/Jacmel, the feeling of unease is complete.
Intriguingly, however, it soon becomes clear that it is Dave who is the
real menace, not Jacmel. Jacmel, after all, is a professional, and not
given to violence without profit. Dave, on the other hand, has been
lured into the criminal enterprise partly by the thought of the payoff,
partly as a way of revenging himself upon his employers for the
perceived wrong of his subservient position, and partly because Louise
has been frying his brain with hot sex and plenty of it. Dave is a
first-class coward, and it comes as little surprise when we learn that
he is a first-class bully, also. He takes the first chance that offers
of beating the elderly Howard, and would certainly hurt the child too,
if his mingled fear and hatred of Jacmel would permit him to do it. The
third point of the criminal triangle, Louise, loses her life when the
mamba announces its presence in the house. Horrified and panicked, and
understandably, by his lover’s gruesome demise, Dave needs only the
slightest opportunity to precipitate catastrophe. He gets it when the
unfortunate Sergeant Nash, following up on Marion Stowe’s report,
presents himself at the house. One shotgun blast and one dead policeman
later, an attempted kidnapping has escalated into a full-scale siege.
And it is at this point
in the story that Venom really
works up a head of steam, with the arrival on the scene of Commander
William Bulloch. It had been a long time since I last saw this film, and
strangely enough, in between viewings the thing about it that stayed
with me most fondly was not the snake – and nor was it Klaus and/or Ollie. It was Nicol
Williamson’s performance as Bulloch. The fact that Williamson manages
to hold his own against two such notorious scenery-chewers speaks for
itself. His Bulloch is a shaded, detailed, often funny creation; rude,
bad-tempered, foul-mouthed, hugely egotistical and occasionally
alarming, the police officer proves to have unexpected depths, as in his
respectful dealings with Marion Stowe, or his handling of Ruth Hopkins.
Upon hearing that Philip’s mother has flown back from Rome and is
rushing to the scene, Bulloch snarls disgustedly, “Oh, terrific!
That’ll be a great help!”
– yet when he speaks to the distraught woman, he is both gentle and
reassuring. (There’s also a moment of near shocking restraint from
Bulloch when one Lord Dunning, presumably the Home Secretary, drops in
upon the siege, seemingly for no reason other than to put a bit more
pressure upon the people actually having to deal with the crisis. “We
wouldn’t want anything to go wrong,
would we?” he says with a singular lack of helpfulness. Bulloch simply
looks at him, his expression
suggesting that he could ask nothing more of life than for the
politician himself to open a box with a black mamba in it.) Bulloch is a man whose
reputation precedes him, and whose credentials as a siege-breaker are
sketched with admirable, and amusing, economy. The mere mention of
Bulloch’s name is sufficient to reduce Dave to a quivering heap of
jelly; his men are clearly devoted to him, and terrified of
him, in about equal measure; while his handling of a previous siege,
which lasted a full five days, is spoken of only in the most hushed of
voices. The central joke of Venom
is that Bulloch is almost as much of a cold-blooded bastard as Jacmel
himself; and a large portion of the film’s entertainment value lies in
the battle of wits between these two well-matched adversaries. And it is
a fair fight, refreshingly;
the screenplay does Bulloch no undeserved favours. At one point, indeed,
the police officer is out-manoeuvred by Jacmel with embarrassing
thoroughness, while late in the story, after Jacmel resorts to a
particularly grisly ploy, Bulloch actually begins to contemplate the
unthinkable: letting the kidnappers win. But that’s before the mamba
decides to intervene….
If
things are interesting out in the street, there are even more fun and
games going on inside the house. Venom
features an unexpectedly controlled performance from Klaus Kinski; his
Jacmel his cold, deliberate and deadly – in a way that, inevitably,
invites comparison with the mamba itself. Oliver Reed’s Dave, on the
other hand, is a sweaty, snivelling, sauced-up disaster waiting to
happen. The scenes between these two legendary cinematic psychos are
simply unforgettable. According to the DVD commentary by director Piers
Haggard (which is good reason in itself to grab the Blue Underground
release), Kinski and Reed loathed each other on sight, and all of that
comes out on screen – although the screenplay gives the former all of
the advantages. Their relationship, in fact, is beautifully delineated
in their first meeting, when Dave opens the door of the front seat of the Rolls for Jacmel, inviting him in as a partner,
and Jacmel responds by climbing into the back
seat, establishing himself as Dave’s superior. Their working
relationship finally climaxes when – oh, how Klaus must have enjoyed this! – Jacmel loses patience and slaps the panic-ridden chauffeur
stupid. (What this scene actually put me most in mind of was Bette
Davis’s manhandling of Miriam Hopkins in Old
Acquaintance. I watch way
too many movies….)
Indelible as are the
three central performances in Venom,
the rest of the cast lends solid support. Sarah Miles is particularly
convincing as Marion, an ordinary person whose attempt to do the right
thing lands her squarely in the middle of a nightmare. By the end of the
film, Miles has almost succeeded in raising “nervous laughter” to
the level of an art form. Conversely, the performance of Sterling Hayden
as Howard Anderson is a bit uneven. In the early sections of the film,
Hayden rather overdoes the “bluff old buffer” routine; he is better
once the siege is underway. As with most of the characters in this film,
there is some interesting ambiguity about Howard. We’re never quite
sure whether his stories about his past adventures are true, albeit
spiced up with a little colourful exaggeration, or whether he’s a
delusional old blow-hard, as the alacrity with which he swallows “Mr
Kepler’s” ego-stroking job offer would suggest. In any case, if he has
been guilty of self-aggrandisement, Howard is thoroughly punished for it
when Jacmel takes him at his own word, and insists that he,
the self-declared “expert”, search the house for the mamba.
As
is so often true of British films, there are numerous subsidiary
pleasures to be found amongst the supporting cast of Venom.
Long-time genre fans are treated to a brief appearance by John
Forbes-Robertson, who plays the poor doomed sod of a cop who takes
Marion Stowe’s phonecall about the snake mix-up and shows up at the
Hopkins house at precisely the wrong moment. Forbes-Robertson appeared
over the years in such films as The Vampire Lovers and Vault
Of Horror, and won himself a slice of immortality (of a sort) by
playing Count Dracula in Hammer’s bizarre horror-kung fu crossover, The
Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires. Venom
also boasts another cameo appearance that is memorable for all sorts of
different reasons. As mentioned above, reptile expert David Ball acted
as mamba wrangler for this production, and the film-makers paid tribute
to his courage (and foolhardiness) by having Marion Stowe suggest to
Bulloch that he “contact David Ball – he’s better equipped at
dealing with this sort of situation than I am!” Ball did not play
himself in the film, however, but instead is portrayed by Michael Gough,
who makes the most of his few brief scenes with Nicol Williamson as the
story begins to move towards its conclusion. In addition, Michael Gwilym
is very effective as Bulloch’s loyal right-hand man, Dan Spencer,
whose talents extend well beyond the purely legal. (“I don’t know
why they bother,” he comments scornfully of a shop’s security
system, while committing a Bulloch-sanctioned break and enter.) I’m
also fond of Gerard Ryder’s turn as Smith, a forensics boffin who
provides Bulloch with an invaluable piece of information at a critical
junction, and whose appearance in this film is a salutary reminder that
for some people, the seventies never
ended.
But
enough about actors! What about the non-human
star of Venom? Piers Haggard’s deployment of the mamba is actually one of
the more skilful aspects of the film, since the snake in truth gets
limited screen time. However, there is never a moment after its initial
escape that we don’t feel
its presence. The mamba makes a spectacular entrance when it attacks
Louise Andrews, biting her time and again on the face before
disappearing into the recesses of the house. Louise’s ensuing death
is, I am compelled to point out, more than a little inaccurate. After
staggering around the house for about ten minutes (rather like Leslie
Daniels in The Brain That
Wouldn’t Die), Louise finally goes into a horrific series of
body-wrenching convulsions, succumbing to the venom in her system with
blood upon her lips and her skin a sickly grey. However, considering the
dose of venom that Louise received, and where she received it, it is
highly unlikely that she would have done any
of these things; almost immediate respiratory failure and paralysis are
a far more likely outcome. (Of course, if Louise didn’t
convulse, we’d have missed out on the sight of Susan George’s blouse
popping open, and her skirt getting hiked up around her knickers as she
thrashed around. And we wouldn’t want that,
would we?) Be that as it may, Louise’s death certainly serves its
purpose, which is to freak out both the other characters and
the audience. Shortly after this scene, Marion Stowe gets to explain to
Bulloch just how dangerous
“very dangerous” is, her speech being intercut with footage of the
mamba, including one absolutely indelible moment when the snake lifts
its body, opens wide its pitch-black mouth, and lunges towards the
camera. The magnitude of the threat posed by the animal having thus been
established, it spends much of the rest of the film as an unseen menace,
shots of it gliding silently through the house’s heating ducts being
supplemented with suggestive shadows and movements, and the extensive
(rather too extensive, to be
honest) use of “mamba-cam”. The effect is singularly unnerving –
enough to make even a snake nut like me sit with her feet tucked up for
the duration of the film – and to keep well
away from the curtains.
But of course, the snake
does turn up in, uh, person from time to time. The trick is trying
to guess when and where it will happen; and Piers Haggard does a very
clever job in mis-directing the viewer. The mamba’s appearances are
generally unexpected, the audience having been lured into thinking that
the point of a particular scene is something else. And in fact, it is
the way the snake is used that gives Venom
the edge over a lot of structurally similar movies, as what are set up
as fairly standard thriller scenes end up going in unpredictable
directions purely because of the mamba’s presence. As is usually the
case with animals in movies, the mamba demonstrates a remarkable talent
for delineating the good guys and the bad guys; and despite Bulloch’s
best efforts outside (and even inside,
briefly), it is ultimately the reptilian deus
ex machina – or perhaps satanas
ex machina would be a more accurate way of putting it – that
brings the hostage crisis to an end. Expected though this may be
in one sense, the actual mechanics of the demises of the remaining
criminal pair are likely to catch the viewer off-guard – particularly
with respect to Dave’s exit, which is a masterpiece of poetic justice.
Ah, dear…. This is one of those moments that makes reviewing
difficult. On one hand, I’m simply desperate
to tell you what happens in that scene; on the other, I wouldn’t for
quids spoil the fun of anyone who hasn’t seen the film. So I’ll just
say this: if you were to compile a list of Ways I Would Prefer Not To
Die, Ollie’s fate in Venom would probably end up somewhere near the top of it….
Separated
at birth?
Mamba image copyright Geoff Dore
Photography (http://www.geoffdore1.com/index.htm)
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Director: