There have been enough articles on why Spiderman 3 is a clumsy, bloated mess, so I won't add my own to the pile. What actually upset me more than any of the gaping plot holes or the gruelling run time was the fact that Venom's tongue was missing!

I don't care what Sam Raimi says (remember, people, this is the man who directed The Quick and the Dead and is not to be trusted): Venom is my favourite Spider-Man villain of all time. On top of being one of the most outlandishly weird concepts in Marvel Universe history, Venom just LOOKS COOL. He's dressed all in black (as villains should be) and he looks like he'd eat you as soon as look at you. In fact, he might not even stop to look.

Part of this is the teeth, I grant you. They're sharp and jagged and nasty and look like they'd hurt. But the true horror lies between them, slithering and flicking its dripping, slimy way out into the open from the depths of that ghastly mouth. VENOM'S TONGUE. Take a look at the picture on the right and tell me the thought of that thing shooting out into your eye socket doesn't make you feel just a teensy bit nervous. Eee-ew.

So where was it in the movie? Let's face it. Movie-Venom kind of sucked. As if it wasn't bad enough that his face kept morphing back into carrot-topped buffoon Topher Grace (who looks about as scary as a paperboy), he was TONGUELESS even in full snarling monster mode. HE HAD NO TONGUE.

Is there a conspiracy here? As an organ, the tongue - a harmless little bit of skeletal muscle, surely? - has a long history of unsettling the moral majority:

In the 70s, Gene Simmons's freakishly long appendage become virtually synonymous with shock-rockers KISS and the horror they created amongst parents and teachers, thus something of a totem for their fans. Rumours abounded, when I was in school, that he had had a cow's tongue grafted on. No one wanted to admit it was possible for that to exist on a human being! People fear the tongue.

In 1988, cock-rockers Poison had the cover to their album Open Up And Say ... aaah! banned after protests came rolling in about the long-tongued, red-skinned demon on the cover. All copies were swiftly recalled. However, one discreet blacking out of the demon's tongue later and the album was re-released into the world without complaint.

So who knows? Perhaps someone, somewhere up in Columbia Pictures still cowers at the thought of an organ as lascivious as the tongue being slapped across the big screen? Perhaps it's simply not suitable for kids to see one that long?

My own personal theory is that there's been some weird superhero movie cast crossover and Jessica Biel (aka, er, Abigail Whistler in Blade: Trinity) has acquired Venom's tongue by mistake. The horror, the horror ...