ScreenCrush editor-in-chief Matt Singer loves movies and has an unholy fascination with food inspired by movies. These are his stories.

Today’s Movie Food: Venom Symbiotic Dark Cherry Limeade.

Movie Food’s Official Description: “BRISK takes on supervillains with Marvel’s Venom hitting theaters October 5, 2018 with … Brisk Symbiotic Dark Cherry Limeade!  A deep dark crimson red Black Cherry Tea Lemonade with on pack graphics to the delight Marvel fans with a dark side!”

What Matt Ate Drank:

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The Verdict:

To paraphrase Dan Aykroyd, it’s clean, simple, and after five or ten bottles of Venom Symbiotic Dark Cherry Limeade, it gets to be quite a rush!

Let me state right off the bat: I didn’t set out to purchase this many bottles of Brisk. I’ve been searching for this stuff all over Manhattan and Brooklyn for weeks. Ready to finally give up, I jokingly tweeted at the official Brisk account that they should send me a bottle — and then they very sincerely did.

Reader, I slid into the DMs. And reader, they prepared the symbiote. 12 freaking bottles of the symbiote.

My great thanks to the heroes of Brisk for going above and beyond and sending me enough Dark Cherry Limeade to hydrate an entire army of symbiotes. They are dedicated to their craft of making iced tea adjacent beverages, and I appreciate their efforts in that regard. But I have no symbiotes at my disposal (yet). So it’s just me sitting here, trying to drink all this Venom drink before it expires. I’m gonna be watering my plants with Dark Cherry Limeade and using this liquid as mouthwash just to get through all of it before it expires.

As for the taste: It’s not bad! My one gripe would be that with a name like “Dark Cherry Limeade” one expects to taste both cherry (dark or otherwise) and lime. I only taste cherry. It’s a lot of cherry. Cherry cherry cherry. Cherry on the tongue, cherry going down, cherry aftertaste once you’ve finished the bottle. It’s a decent cherry; if you like cherry flavored beverages, this will be your jam whether or not you have any idea who Venom is. But you better like cherry a lot. (The list of ingredients mentions “clarified lemon juice concentrate” rather than lime, along with two different kinds of tea, neither of which I could detect beneath the mountain of cherry.)

Does This Food Beverage Properly Reflect the Movie?

I think if Brisk’s Venom juice* really had strong cherry and lime flavors, you could make a case for it actually being a “symbiotic” beverage, with two different fruits inhabiting the same space, the same way Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote must share Tom Hardy’s gruff, bottled-iced-tea-loving body. It doesn’t, though, so on that front it kind of falls short.

It’s very possible if I had drank all 12 bottles in one sitting, the massive dose of corn syrup might have actually made me hear voices in my head the way Eddie does when he bonds with Venom. However, I am not brave enough to find out. That said, it’s a pretty tasty drink — and the ingredients list includes such interesting concoctions as “acesulfame potassium” and “calcium disodium EDTA” — compounds that sound as if they could have been created by Riz Ahmed’s sinister Life Foundation as part of their research into the life cycles of alien symbiotes. Drinking them does make me feel that perhaps I am part of some unholy beverage-related experiment. So partial credit on a movie connection there.

I’m not sure I will be able to drink all 12 bottles of this Dark Cherry Limeade, but I will definitely drink at least one or two more. I just hope it’s not really accurate to the movie and then causes carnage in my intestines.

(*Contains 1 percent juice, per the bottle label.)

UPDATE: After I published this article, I happened to glance at myself in the mirror — and discovered another way in which Symbiotic Dark Cherry Limeade is a faithful representation of Venom: Look at what it did to my tongue:

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My tongue hasn’t grown (at least I don’t think it has) but it definitely possesses a distinctive, symbiotic, blood-red hue. It’s as if I just chomped the heads off a mugger. (I checked the ingredient label one more time: No mugger heads in Symbiotic Dark Cherry Limeade.) If this was an intentional design choice, then additional kudos must be extended to the Brisk team — provided my tongue eventually goes back to normal. If it stays this way, I’m going to be pissed.

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