Silent Venom (US, 2009)

Let’s give a round of applause to the not-so-famous wrestler Fabulous Freddie Valentine, a man who is chasing his dreams. Including that of being a filmmaker, which is one of the many things he does under his slightly more famous birth name, Fred Olan Ray.

Sure, most of his low-budget to Z-budget films aren’t very good – see: Biological hazard (1985), Toxic (2001), et alia — but give the man credit: he may do what he loves badly (well, “badly” mostly), but he does it and makes a living from it. Remember that the next time you’re serving burgers at McDs or earning your rent money by wiping the smegma off your John’s Oscar Meyer while your own dreams slip further and further away…

We don’t know who had the original idea for the film, director Fabulous Freddie Valentine or regular TV-film writer Mark “Amazing Onionhead” Sanderson, but the inspiration is clear: here, instead of Snakes in an airplane (2006) featuring a down-on-his-luck star having fun, we have snakes on a submarine, with nameless actors and down-on-his-luck stars desperately trying to pay their rent.

German trailer to

Silent Venom:

But if Snakes in an airplane fully embraces its low-culture, grindhouse roots (who can forget the well-aimed snakebite on the blonde’s bare nipple?) to become mindless exploitation fun, Silent Venom prefers an attempt at low-budget TV seriousness and wallows in an atmosphere that could be described as “suitable for the family”. (Despite the female character’s mania for showering on the submarine, we never get a discreet skin scene.*) Just like the older, campier, faster, more violent and much better science fiction film Space Marines (1996), Silent Venom comes across as a children’s film with no children in the cast. So, how much you’ll enjoy this film depends on how much you like run-of-the-mill TV movies and movies aimed at family audiences.

* Krista Allen, who plays the only female lead, has showered nude in other film projects, However, like in the super cheesy horror movie Haunted Sea (1997 / trailer). The film is a slimy reinterpretation of Roger Corman’s horror comedy Creature from the Ghost Sea (1961 / trailer / full movie).

Given the TV movie and family audience appeal of the D2V film, it’s easy to understand why claims have been made that Silent Venom is a skewed remake of an obscure CBS movie of the week starring David Janssen ((March 27, 1931 – February 13, 1980) of Cult of the Cobra (1955 / trailer), The Swiss Conspiracy (1976) and Moon of the Wolf (1972)), the long forgotten Fer de Lance (1974 / full movie). That said, although the movie is somewhat boring and not all that funny Fer de Lance and the somewhat boring but occasionally fun Silent Venom share some fundamental plot similarities (most notably: snakes on a submarine), we see Silent Venom less influenced by that piece of CBS junk than by an older, more well-known TV series: Journey to the bottom of the sea (1964-68). The underused but present concept of oversized “mutant snakes” fits into the show’s general science fiction orientation — submarine monsters were not unheard of on that show — and it’s easy to imagine the sub’s main male trio, Commander James O’Neill (Luke Perry (Oct. 11, 1966 – Mar. 4, 2019) American Stray Dogs (1996), below from his role as a disgraced homophobic preacher in the TV series Oz (1997-2003)) & Lt Commander Houston Davies (John L. Curtis) & Eddie Boudreau (Anthony Tyler Quinn), along with a number of recognizable special guest stars, who experience a new low-budget adventure each week. The only Silent Venom What ultimately undermines that concept is that the film ends with Luke Perry’s character retiring.

Silent Venom begins on a Pacific island that looks a lot like the California scrub, where we meet the movie’s asshole who wants to kill you, Jake Goldin (Louis Mandylor of The Prometheus Project (2010)), you get to see two non-characters die – one from a snakebite, the other from being eaten by a giant, mutated snake in a scene that’s as laughable as anything you’ll see in The Snake King (2005) — and meet assistant Jake’s beautiful herpetologist boss, Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista “Can’t Play MILF” Allen by Party (2005 / trailer)), who wears tight thong tops and performs dark military experiments and mutations on poisonous snakes. Then, on a generic military office set, we meet Commander James O’Neill (Perry), whose moment of integrity has cost him his career, and who is given the chance to save his retirement by Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom “I Take Every Job I Do Seriously” Berenger) by delivering a deactivated and therefore unarmed submarine somewhere in Asia.

And so it is that when Dr. Swanson and Jake have to evacuate the island because of incoming Chinese, O’Neill’s submarine is the only viable option. Being the scoundrel that he is, Jake smuggles aboard some two dozen deadly snakes (including two giant mutants) and, while the sub plays cat and mouse with a Chinese war fleet, they promptly escape and start killing sailors.

Okay, Krista Allen is seriously miscast as the herpetologist, but her character is relatively unimportant to the film; that they cast such a beautiful actress in the role at all is only to add some sexual tension between the taciturn, sleepwalking Luke Perry, something that really gets going during an oddly funny scene where Commander O’Neill slowly takes deadly snakes from Dr. Swanson (only to casually toss them aside): Ray films the scene as if it’s a teasing foreplay – not that the teasing ever pays off.

Jake Goldin, on the other hand, is really well cast and manages to portray the annoying immaturity of his annoying younger brother well. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002 / trailer) and its sequels, such as the last one, My Big Fat Greek Wedding III (2023 / trailer), from which the image below comes, to be the man you really, really want to see die; he’s so inherently unlikable (aside from one inexplicable scene in which he takes offense to the sexism of young — and soon-to-be-dead — sailor Rhodes (Haran Jackson)) that you almost believe he’s supposed to be that way in real life, too. (But who knows, maybe he is.)

Berenger, in his standard role as the base’s good guy, is on screen more than you might expect for what was undoubtedly a one-day job, but as always he gives no indication that he knows he’s in a crappy movie. (Unlike Perry, whose dry characterization of Commander O’Neill often comes across as the result of a subliminal desire to be anywhere but in the movie.)

Silent Venom is more than slightly padded in more ways than one. Not only do most of the scenes drag on in the style of a TV movie and the two-part credit sequence is far too long, there’s also an overdose of stock-footage submarine shots. And the whole cat-and-mouse subplot of the submarine trying to avoid detection by the evil Chinese feels less relevant than casual padding for a story that really had nowhere else to go once the snakes were released.

Likewise, given how much technical equipment is easily damaged on a submarine, there’s a lot of pointless firing of guns at snakes, most of which – save for the two large mutants – aren’t exactly great targets. Still, it’s fun to watch the snakes disappear and reappear: just as all the bite victims (save for the galley cook) are beamed to sickbay, the timing of the snake appearances is wildly inconsistent – for example, the snake canister is barely opened and one can be seen wriggling across Jake’s bag and under Dr. Swanson’s towel – and they seem to appear and disappear almost as they please, as when they’re actually suddenly between Boudreau and Dr. Swanson as the two run through the subway hallway.

In short, Silent Venom has just as many flaws as other Fred Olan Ray films, but it’s still a little more fun than many, provided you tap into your inner child and enjoy the film for what it essentially is: a TV movie for the whole family.

The very young and those suffering from ophidiophobia may find the film frightening, especially since there are clearly many real snakes in it (except the mutated ones), but everyone else will see the film as harmless nonsense that offers nothing new and no surprises. There is no way to necessarily watch it, Silent Venom passes the test of possible TV viewing with the kids or with nothing else at hand. But don’t bother looking this one up because it’s definitely not that good.