I could smell Venom from a long way off, and so could Tom Hardy when he said his favorite parts of the film didn’t make the final cut. So (and who could blame me?) I blew off last week’s all-media screening. Most of us understand the concept of “so bad it’s good” (which I have a place in my head for) but the critical consensus was mostly “it isn’t ludicrous enough to be enjoyable…it’s just garden-variety shitty….later.”

The Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings are 35% and 30%, respectively. Seattle Times‘ critic Soren Andersen called it “perhaps the worst Marvel-derived origin story ever.” The Globe and Mail‘s Sarah-Tai Black said Venom “made me laugh so hard I started crying…a horribly scripted film so bad as to be enjoyable, but not bad enough to be good.” And so on.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]