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Snakes in Movies   Venom (1981)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   "The mystery of "The Birds", The danger of "Psycho", The evil of "The Omen", The terror of "Jaws", Now, the ultimate in suspense." "Kidnappers terrify... black mambas kill!" This is one of those rare bad movies with good actors and good production values. The plot is weak but it creates enough tension that you both fear the deadly Black Mamba but also root for it to kill the creeps. Best of all, the live Black Mambas used in the movie were real snakes from the London Zoo. A young boy from a rich family goes to pick up an African House snake he ordered at an exotic pet store in London, but he is given a box with a Black Mamba instead. The snakes were accidentally mixed up. The mamba was meant to go to the London Institute of Toxicology but they got the house snake instead. Oops. This is also the day the maid and the chauffeur decided to bring in a really nasty man (played by Klaus Kinski) to kidnap the boy to hold him for ransom. But the maid opens the snake box and gets a face full of Black Mamba fangs, and doesn't last long after that. The snake escapes and we see lots of "mamba cam" views of it crawling through the metal heating ducts, making those flat-tire hissing sounds all snakes always make in movies (but very few make in the real world.) The people are trapped in the house with a police blockade outside and a bloodthirsty flesh-crazed dangerous monster wandering around inside - Klaus Kinski. Besides Kinski, there's also a highly deadly venomous snake, but I still think that Kinski is worse. Oddly enough, the snake doesn't try to get out of the house or hide somewhere, as I'd expect a snake to do, all it wants to do is hunt down and kill people. The mama mamba crawls up the chauffeur's pants and bites him where it really hurts. Then, when Kinski is doing his best psychotic madman impression for the police surrounding him, the snake shows up to save the day by lunging and biting at him so viciously that Kinski stumbles out onto the patio where the police snipers shoot him with ten thousand bullets, but he still has enough life left in him to shoot off the mamba's head with his pistol. Of course, as you would totally expect from a horror film, the last shot is of two snake eggs in the heating duct, with a little baby snake just hatched. Fortunately, they did not make a seque to this... yet. The snake overacts, as they usually do in movies, lungeing again and again with its mouth wide open showing its fangs and hissing like crazy. We learn lots of fun false mamba facts from the venom expert at the zoo who says the Black Mamba is " the fastest snake in the world. They're capable of launching themselves bodily 10 to 15 feet through the air. They strike so fast that nobody could possibly get away." And that even with anti-venim there's only a 50/50 chance of the victim living. There's also only a 50/50 chance that you will finish watching the entire movie unless you're a fan of bad snake movies, and why would you be reading this if you weren't?