'Silent Venom' DVD Review

Dull, cheap, derivative Sci Fi Channel fodder.

I can picture the pitch for Silent Venom: "So, there are snakes on a submarine..." The end. There's little else to this awful animals-gone-amok film, which would occupy the lower tier of even the cheesy Sci Fi Channel weekend fare. The generic title is an indication of how derivative and humorless the movie is. Couldn't they have hade some fun with the silly concept? Snakes on a Sub? Das Bite?

Instead we have a mindless monster movie on autopilot with the requisite sexy scientist (Krista Campbell) working for the requisite shady government dudes with the requisite shady co-worker who causes the snakes to escape, bringing in the requisite square-jawed hero (Luke Perry) who does things "on his own terms." In the case of Silent Venom, the government uses a sub to evacuate vaccine-developing scientists studying snakes on an island in the East China Sea before the Chinese navy gets a hold of the research. Voila, we have snakes on a sub.

Most of the snakes on board are normal enough, but two mutate to above-average size. I can't even call them giant; there's not that much space on a sub, after all. Strangely, the movie chooses to show a HUGE man-eating snake for about 30 seconds, but it's left on the island and never mentioned again. All we get are its babies. Yawn.

Most of the snakes in the movie are actually real snakes, and when you see how poor the CGI on the two above-average snakes is, you know why. (The giant plastic snake heads are even worse.) Unfortunately, despite being labeled "aggressive," the snakes just slither around people's feet for much of the film. The movie pads the "tension" with attempts by the sub's crew to avoid detection by the Chinese navy, so we basically get The Hunt for Red October meets Snakes on a Plane. With rubber snake heads.

The DVD

No special features.

Movie: D
DVD: F