Review: ‘Silent Venom’

If you’re looking for a sound financial investment in today’s weakened market, might I suggest dropping your investment dollars into a new sure-fire, fail-safe opportunity that has proven itself stable and consistent? The trend of killer animal movies has never been stronger and perhaps the most attractive killer animal movie sub-genre is with snakes. I say this because, without fail, producers continue to produce killer snake movies and that means they must be making money because no producer goes into a production such as these without knowing a profit is to be had.

‘Silent Venom’ is just one of the newest additions to this genre of DVD goldmines. Veteran schlock-maestro Fred Olen Ray (Evil Toons) directed ‘Silent Venom’, which is a slight stray from some of his more typical films, such as ‘Teenage Cavegirl’ and ‘Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle’. Of course, you may not of heard of him as these Skin-A-Max blockbusters were directed under his pseudonym Nicholas Medina.

The movie stars Luke Perry as disgraced Lt. Commander James O’Neill, who is given one final redeeming mission as delivery boy of a decommissioned submarine being sold to Taiwan. Perry has been suffering a real slump ever since ‘John From Cincinnati’ was cancelled, although some would say it’s been longer than that. While en route to Taiwan, O’Neill’s crew is ordered to divert their mission and rendezvous at Manku Island off the Chinese coast to rescue two military research scientists before a massive Chinese Naval maneuver threatens them and their top secret research.

So, where do the snakes come into play, you ask? Well, can’t you read between the lines? The snakes ARE the top secret research, of course. Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista Allen) and her beady-eyed assistant Jake (Louis Mandylor) are conducting research on snake venom as a potential life-saver for soldiers against bio-chemical weapons. When their research on the island is threatened, Dr. Swanson orders Jake to destroy the experiments and save only four of the native snakes. Ah, but you know Jake, the opportunistic little weasel he is decides to “sneak” all twenty snakes on board their rescue submarine with hopes of getting rich off selling these rare snakes on the black market.

Need I go any further? As you could imagine, the story takes a relatively obvious direction from here and you might as well fill in the blanks yourself, unless you actually decide to go rent the DVD and see for yourself, which is perfectly acceptable. Personally, I think the movie would have been more effectively titled ‘Snakes on a Submarine’. Consistency is key, you know. Tom Berenger has a small role in the film as well, playing Admiral Bradley Wallace.

Overall, ‘Silent Venom’ is a movie you expect to find playing on a weekend afternoon on the Sci-Fi Channel during some holiday weekend marathon. The visual approach is that of any average Joe taking an expensive HD Steadi-Cam out for a test drive. The special effects are few and far between and, consisting of one short scene featuring a laughable CGI momma snake the size of an 18-wheeler and a handful of quick shots of equally laughable CGI baby snakes the size of anacondas.

Aside from this, the remainder of the creature effects are handled with piles of live snakes squirming around within the submarine, a la the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ snake scene. Luke Perry even gets to utter a classically Harrison Ford-influenced line of dialogue during his epic fight scene with one of the two mutant baby snakes… “Snakes. I hate ’em”. If you’re looking for a good movie to laugh at and make fun of, then this one would do the trick.

‘Silent Venom’ makes it’s DVD debut on June 2, 2009.