Well the second Venom trailer hit a couple of days ago, and it actually featured Venom! The question now, though, is was that really a good thing? Here’s a look at the trailer and then the Psycho Drive-In All-Stars share some of their thoughts about what we just watched.

— Adam Barraclough

Tom Hardy’s sweaty and fidgety Eddie Brock could be enough to entice me to buy a ticket to Venom. Regardless of the quality of a film, Hardy always brings a distinct energy to his work. He isn’t an actor who has the best taste in material per se, but he certainly knows how to physically and emotionally inhabit characters that are thinly drawn. I wouldn’t say this trailer debunks that claim.

The footage doesn’t match step with Hardy though. Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Gangster Squad) looks to be continuing his descent from hip young director to a one-hit wonder. But, I wouldn’t necessarily place the blame of this trailer on him. It seems, at the outset, like an odd juxtaposition of tone. It looks like Venom is one-part psychological thriller, one-part horror, and one-part superhero film.

Sony Pictures has had troubles bringing any of their superheroes to the screen for several years now. I don’t fault the effort here. It looks like they are trying to latch onto a different style and look at the dark side of superheroes. But, this looks more like Spawn and less like Logan.

But, something had to draw these actors to the material. Michelle Williams, until recently, is incredibly selective of her work. She is arguably one of the two or three finest actresses of her generation, so to see her surface in a film like this makes me a little intrigued. Riz Ahmed is an actor whose name has been on the rise for several years now is typically very good with selecting interesting material. Then, there is Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, and the potential of Tom Holland surfacing as Spider-man. So, I feel like there has to be something here.

This trailer isn’t all bad. I think the first half is pretty compelling. Then, Venom begins to take stage with some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in a while to put a real damper on the mood. I hope this is just some of the unpolished footage because this will make action scenes unwatchable.

I’m oddly interested to see where this goes. I don’t think it looks good, but I think there is a thread of hope here. It may be just a stand, but it is at least something.

— Peterson Hill

When I first heard the casting news that Tom Hardy was going to be Eddie Brock in a new Venom movie, I was excited. What perfect casting. Then we got the teaser trailer for Venom and I got a little more excited for the movie. I thought it was a smart idea not to actually show Venom. That is the moment you can save for the theatre and get butts in seats, reward us for our patience. But Sony decided to jump the shark and give us an official trailer for Venom and oh boy, I have thoughts.

My initial thought while watching the Venom trailer was this movie looks like and feels like a live-action adaptation of the video game Prototype. The “sim-BYE-oat” just popping out of Eddie looks like bad video game graphics. At first, I thought the symbiote looked bad because I was watching the trailer on my cell phone but when I watched the trailer again on my 4k TV the CG didn’t get any better. Then, when we got to the reveal of Venom I was laughing. I thought we had improved CG since 2007 but Sam Raimi’s Venom looks better than Ruben Fleischer’s Venom. I really hope that the CG is not the finished product, but I thought the same thing about the CG from the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailers.

My other big issue with this trailer is the voice work. Once again Tom Hardy is playing an iconic comic book villain and he is making a “creative choice” for his accent. At least this time Tom isn’t going with an evil German scientist accent but what region of America is he basing his accent on? Is it same place that Michelle Williams found hers? Some really bad part of Boston? But I will give the movie credit for making the symbiote sound like Lance Reddick, which is a nice touch.

I hope that I am wrong, I hope that Venom is better than what this trailer is giving us. But I’m worried that this movie will be sub-par super hero film with a final battle of Venom taking on a gang of “sim-BYE-oats”. Amazing how one trailer can make me go from being excited for a movie to feeling meh about it.

— Eric Muller

Having just watched the new trailer for the new Venom movie, set in its own, new cinematic universe, I have some thoughts. Well, mostly one thought. This movie is going to bad.

Like, real bad you guys.

For those of you who don’t know, here’s a primer on Venom as he exists in many of his incarnations. Eddie Brock is most often portrayed as a contemporary of Peter Parker, a journalist/scientist. Eddie was always a little rougher around the edges than Parker, and when this gets him into trouble (in most incarnations, due to Parker/Spiderman) he is accidentally exposed to the alien symbiote who is also angry at Parker for rejecting it. They go on a tear and try to kill Spiderman. That’s the basis of the whole character, so you can see how a movie featuring Venom that doesn’t include Spiderman, or any current incarnation of Spiderman, is off to a rocky start.

Add that to the fact that Eddie comes off as incompetent rather than brutal, and the symbiote’s origin seems to be local and not alien, and you’ve pretty much gutted the character. Oh, they also pronounce the word as symb-eye-ote in the trailer, which seems like a thing you’d save for people to find out in the theater. Like the butchering of names in The Last Airbender which, judging by this trailer, Venom is looking to emulate.

The effects work shown in the trailer is also pretty lazy. In the trailer Eddie Brock uses Venom tentacles to latch back onto his motorcycle and to push around some thugs, all without ever turning into the big bad himself. Also, Venom in the comics has shapeshifting powers, as well as the powers the symbiote learned to emulate from Spiderman. Since there’s no Spiderman, it wouldn’t make sense for him to use those powers. Though making a Venom movie without Spiderman in the mix is the dumbest part of this whole thing, since Venom is pretty much the iconic villain for Spiderman.

Another hallmark of the character is Eddie and the symbiote teaming up to get revenge on the people who they hate, also seems to be scrapped in favor of a stuttering confused mess, fighting with the symbiote for control of Eddie’s body. This whole thing is a mess. Hard pass. Do not pass Go, do not give these people any money.

— Jeffrey Roth

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