Piers Haggard’s 1981 thriller is notable for the combination of two of cinema’s most notorious hell-raisers, Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski. From all accounts, they hated each other, and it’s remarkable that Haggard kept the film on track. They play two terrorists who attempt to take a child and his grandfather hostage in a London flat, only to find themselves trapped in a siege situation and a deadly black mamba snake loose in the building, picking off the bad-guys one by one. Although Venom failed to do for snakes was jaws did for sharks, venom is quite an engagingly trashy thriller, with the Black Mamba, Kinski and Reed all giving uniformly strong and rather similar performances. Kinski turned down Raiders of the Lost Ark to make this forgotten often amusing film, notable for a scene in which the snake boldly enters Oliver Reed’s trousers.
Just about to write up my review on this one and see you nailed it already. i really must see more of Klaus Kinski hes grotesquely hypnotising in this…
It’s funny that the crime-sheet for Kinski in the MeToo era must be lengthy, and yet he’s still a cult hero…
Read up on him, and he sounds like one of the last of the eccentric actors.