Venom (dir. Piers Haggard, 1981)
No, not the comic book movie with the virtuosic dual performance by Tom Hardy as a loser reporter and a loser alien symbiote falling in love with each other, but instead the British horror thriller in which a kidnapping is disrupted by a deadly snake that a pet store has accidentally given to a young child.
It’s not nearly as memorable as the more recent Venom or suffused with the Forsterian impulse to ‘only connect’ like Eddie Brock and his gooey paramour do, but it still has things to recommend it.
Sterling Hayden, in his final role, is Howard Anderson, an American hotel proprietor in London. Under normal circumstances, this would make him the villain, but real life monster Klaus Kinski is also in the cast as criminal mastermind Jacque Muller. He intends to hold Anderson’s animal loving grandson Philip as a hostage, with assistance from the Anderson’s chauffeur Dave (Oliver Reed) and maid Louise (Susan George). Due to a mixup at the pet store, Philip accidentally takes home a Black Mamba intended for toxicologist Marion Stowe (Sarah Miles), who alerts the emergency authorities when she becomes aware of this mistake. By this point, the snake has already killed one person and escaped its confines, while the police, lead by Commander Wiliam Bulloch (Nicol Williamson) have surrounded the Anderson residence, turning a simple abduction into a standoff.
(Ransom kidnapping has never once gone well in the history of cinema, but they seem to be a viable business in Latin America, so you will have to use your judgment on this one.)
Venom has a great cast, though it could have used the talents of precocious toddler Tom Hardy instead of that kid actor they got. Hayden has long fascinated me: an actor with an arresting presence, who also hates acting, and has the dramatic bio of former OSS officer turned communist sympathizer turned self-loathing informer. Kinski will always be associated with Werner Herzog, so it’s usually interesting to see him outside of that zone, though it’s never been an improvement on Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. Oliver Reed is fine as a child hating driver, but feels underused. Nicol Williamson is always interesting to see. He was primarily a stage actor, and a highly regarded one at that. Being British, however, means that he spent the majority of his film career appearing in utter shit for the paycheck, ultimately ending it all as Al Simmons’s hobo mentor Cagliostro in Spawn.
(Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; and John Leguizamo’s Violator sings thee to thy rest…)
Oh, and the snake action is fine. Using a real Black Mamba on set doesn’t add as much authenticity as you’d think. Really, if you were to replace it with–and I’m just spitballing here–an extraterrestrial creature resembling hot tar that symbiotically bonds with a human host, and, depending on rights issues, could maybe connect to an arachnid themed superhero, then you might really have something.
oliveresque 