Worth Mentioning - Blood Works Best

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A pair of troubled slashers.

VENOM (2005)

Eight years after making the hit slasher movie I Know What You Did Last Summer together, director Jim Gillespie and screenwriter Kevin Williamson were brought back together to make the slasher movie Venom for Dimension Films – and Dimension had franchise plans for this property, which was based on a video game idea that had been pitched to them by Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten. They had a successful team behind the movie, the release of the video game was going to coincide with the release of the film, everyone was already looking forward to the production of sequels... but things didn’t pan out. The video game was never made, the film got a small theatrical release and didn’t make much money. There is no Venom franchise. But at least the Venom movie isn’t bad.

Williamson was just attached as producer at first, but after Brandon Boyce wrote the initial screenplay, Williamson did uncredited work on the script as well. The story is set in a small, swampy town in Louisiana, where the construction of a new mill will soon be disturbing an old Creole burial ground. So voodoo priestess Miss Emmie (Deborah Duke) heads out to that burial ground to dig up an old suitcase that contains a bunch of CGI snakes. You see, this woman saves souls by milking evil out of murderers and sadists and transferring that evil into the bodies of snakes. These things are inhabited by the evil of countless souls, so Miss Emmie has to find a new place to put them. Unfortunately, she gets killed in a car accident before she can dispose of the suitcase. Her vehicle plunges into the swamp with local tow truck driver Ray Sawyer, who was trying to help her, inside. The suitcase busts open and the escaping snakes enter Ray’s body, possessing him. 

Some of the locals were creeped out by Ray before, but he was just a quiet guy who kept to himself. Harmless, despite the scar he received in a bar fight. Now he’s dangerous. Possessed by the evil souls, Ray rises from the dead and sets out to murder anyone who crosses his paths. And since this is a slasher movie, most of the people who cross his path happen to be teenagers.

Agnes Bruckner plays heroine Eden Sinclair, who has been planning to go to New York to attend med school. A plan that hasn’t gone over well with her boyfriend Eric, played by Jonathan Jackson, who doesn’t want to move away from their hometown. Eden works in a diner with her best friend Rachel (Laura Ramsey), and it’s also a hangout for Eric and friends Sean (D.J. Cotrona), Ricky (Pawel Szajda), Tammy (Bijou Phillips), and Patty (Davetta Sherwood). All of these characters will end up fighting for their lives in encounters with the possessed Ray. Along the way, Method Man also has some scenes as a police officer and Eden figures out that their best chance of stopping Ray is Miss Emmie’s granddaughter Cece (Meagan Good), who learned some voodoo from her grandma.

The characters in this movie are pretty bland, but it manages to be an entertaining slasher nonetheless, with some nice stalking and slashing and some cool chase sequences. There’s a body count in the double digits, a dark atmosphere, and creepy stuff happening in locations like Ray’s auto shop, a morgue, a voodoo-protected house, and a swamp-side cemetery. Ray tends to use items involved with his job at the auto shop when he kills people: a crowbar, a sandblaster, a car lift, chains. Since he drives around in his tow truck, he even gets to put that to use in a couple standout sequences. In one, he uses the truck to tear out part of the house his intended victims are hiding in. Another is a vehicular chase where he pulls one of the characters out of the car he’s chasing while Eden tries her best to hold on to them. So we get a game of tug-of-war played with a human body stretched between two vehicles as they race down a road.

Another good thing Venom has going for it is the fact that it’s short and sweet. The end credits start to roll at the 80 minute point. So if you’re a slasher fan with 80 minutes to kill, Venom is a fine way to spend those minutes.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE ON THE HILL (2024)

FX artist Tom Devlin made his directorial debut with the 2023 release Teddy Told Me To, and by the end of the year he had made his second film, Las Vegas Frankenstein. Then he got 2024 started with Slaughterhouse on the Hill – and one thing I’m enjoying about Devlin’s directorial career so far is that every movie he has made has had a slasher element to it. That’s not to say that I would be disappointed if Devlin branched away from slasher action, but as a slasher fan, it’s just nice to see that he seems to enjoy bringing bloody slasher moments to the screen. Las Vegas Frankenstein wasn’t as much of a slasher as Teddy Told Me To and Slaughterhouse on the Hill, but still, there was a bit of slashing in there.

Slaughterhouse on the Hill centers on a group of middle-aged friends who were the kings and queens of their high school, Boulder City High, back in the day. Now they’ve returned to the school to take in a homecoming game... then head out to their former hang-out, an abandoned slaughterhouse, apparently located on a hill, to spend the night drinking and dancing. This group consists of former football players Donnie (Jason Wallace), Bo (Chris Arredondo), Pete (Ryan Freeman), and Chuck (Steve Hansen), plus Chuck’s significant other Tracy (Kristy Adams), the solo Becky (Kiki D’Aire), and Donnie’s younger girlfriend Cici (Ashley Ballou) – who is so much younger than him, some mistake her for his daughter.

The movie takes its take to get rolling and I’m not sure presenting it as if it were an episode of a TV show called Under Investigation (hosted by a character played by Trent Haaga) was the best decision... but around the halfway point of its 72 minutes, things get livelier when a homicidal character called Pig Skin shows up. A twisted variation on the mascot for the Boulder City High School football team (the War Pigs), Pig Skin starts slashing his way through the cast of characters. And viewers are not likely to see any of them go.

In the great slasher tradition, Pig Skin is out to avenge a wrong that was committed by the characters years earlier, and it’s entertaining to watch him get his revenge.

Slaughterhouse on the Hill is quite rough around the edges, but it has its moments. And it was nice to see character actor Duane Whitaker, whose credits include Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till Dawn 2, 3 from Hell, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Puppet Master 5, and Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, show up along the way. A lot of viewers will probably be put off by the extremely low budget, awkward editing, and dopey characters... but if those sort of things aren’t deal breakers for you, you might have fun seeing Pig Skin make a mess of these people.