Silent Venom

In recent years it has become a post-modern phenomenon to appreciate a really bad movie. A movie can sometimes be so bad that it then becomes great on the basis of some scale of irony. It probably started with “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” a film that is so utterly terrible that it is in fact one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever captured on film. It is impossibly hilarious, despite its intended purpose. The TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” took this fundamental idea and built a brilliant show around it by adding an audio track to each film in which the hosts of the show would openly mock bad films. Often the films were so bad they didn’t need much mocking to induce laughter. Recently producers have taken notice of this phenomenon and are deliberately making bad films for the audience to appreciate in this way. Films like this are the life blood of the Sci-Fi Channel, and even the studios are getting in the action with movies like “Snakes on a Plane.” The problem is that no one can intentionally create the magic that occurs when people genuinely try to make a good film and it ends up terrible anyway. The result is still funny, but never as funny as it could have been.

“Silent Venom” is one of these films. What makes this so obvious is that the cast of the film contains a lot of familiar names and established talent. They know what good material looks like and also know this wasn’t it. And presumably the only reason they agreed to act in this film was for a paycheck and perhaps the small conciliation that perhaps the people who saw it would be able to enjoy it as a joke and not under the pretense of drama which at any other time in history it would have purported to be. This film might as well be called “snakes on a submarine,” because it is in essence a rip-off of an already bad film. It’s the story of two scientists who are working on experimental snakes for the military in the South Asian Pacific. They are ordered to stop their research and a decommissioned submarine is sent to retrieve them, but one of the scientists can’t resist bringing some of the snakes along with them. As expected, it all goes horribly awry with moderately humorous results. However, for the most part this is not a so-bad-that-it's-good film, but just a bad film.

It’s a shame really because a lot of otherwise talented actors are in this film, but one can only do so much with bad material. It’s clear that this film was only made to capitalize on an audience that would accidentally see it expecting something better, or the audience that knows it’s bad and wants to see it specifically for that reason. This film probably had a shoe-string budget, apparent from the production values or lack there of, and it’s clear that no one really tried too hard with this one. They knew what they were making and made it anyway. I wish I could say that this movie was enjoyable even on an ironic level, but it isn’t really; it’s just not bad enough to redeem itself. It’s a very weird feeling to watch a movie hoping that it will get worse. If you are the kind of person who really loves watching a bad movie then you might get a kick out of this, but otherwise there’s no real reason to see it.