The Good Parasite (for now)

You may recall when Marc Webb’s ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ hit theaters back in 2014, there were rumors of spin-offs from the Spidey film franchise including a “Sinister Six” movie and a “Venom” flick.  As this second installment of the rebooted series (which occurred within 10 years of the Tobey Maguire trilogy) fizzled like Jamie Foxx's Electro at the box office, Sony Pictures (believe it or not, Disney doesn’t own the film rights to Spider-Man) pulled the plug on Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man, thereby leaving the fate of the spin-offs in doubt.  With the success and massive popularity of Disney’s MCU films, however, it was only a matter of time before Spidey crawls out of the woodwork again, this time as part of the MCU in last year’s ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ and this summer’s ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ starring Tom Holland as the youngest web-slinger to date.  Now that Spider-Man is going to stick around, we finally get that ‘Venom’ spin-off we’ve been waiting for (well, for me at least).

 

I’ve always liked Venom.  I know, the alien symbiote appeared in the third installment of the Sam Raimi trilogy back in 2003, but that’s one movie I would rather forget thank you very much.  Creepy and scary as hell, Venom is one of my favorite villains in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery because he’s motherfucking badass, like some kind of evil Spider-Man monstrosity arising from the depths of our worst Freudian nightmares with his rows of piranha-sharp teeth, razor-like claws and pumped-full-of-steroids musculature.

 

While Sony Columbia’s ‘Venom’ starring Tom Hardy doesn’t fit in the official milieu of the MCU, I found it to be a darkly funny romp that’s a bit messy perhaps but no less enjoyable.  Like ‘Deadpool,’ ‘Venom’ proves that Marvel movies featuring secondary or even tertiary characters can succeed commercially (if not critically) even if the Mouse House had nothing to do with it, raking in MCU summer blockbuster-like numbers at the box office in the typically slow month of October.  As its opening weekend grosses of $80 million domestic and $230 million worldwide would suggest, I’m not the only fan of the Big Black Baddie.

Grade: A-