IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 11 minutes of purgatory, rated far too high at 2.9 by 551 misguided cinemitizens.
Verdict: there is no curse, no swamp, and a creature in a rubber mask only appears in the last five minutes when all hope for diversion had long been abandoned.
Sick green seemed the right colour choice.
Three local villains in East Texas hope to trick geologist John Agar into finding undiscovered subsurface oil. The trio together score 99 are the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
The catatonic Agar will make said discovery by drifting in a flat bottomed boat along the Red River, calling it a swamp.
Deep within the ersatz swamp there is a wanna be mad scientist, Dr Dope, and his curvy wife, whom he keeps locked in a room so that she does not interfere with his research. This order of priorities baffled the fraternity brothers, as much does.
By the use of a dry ice bath Dope is trying to transmute individuals into a über creatures with the power to overcome maxed credit cards. His test subjects come from the local village. So far he has failed and he disposes of the bodies of his fails by feeding them to a swimming pool full of alligators. ‘Do alligators like chlorine,’ asked fraternity brothers?
Needing more unwilling specimens, Dope invites the geological exploration party of four to stay overnight in his house. Being lower case dopes, the accept. The dialogue of this soiree is so painfully inept that even the fraternity brothers cringed.
Meanwhile, the local villagers have noticed the decrease in their number and in response play bongo drums. A lot. Then some more. Having got that out of their systems, they dress up in face paint and hang Dr Dope in effigy. By this heap big medicine they hope to stop his inroads into to their number. Must be anti-vaxxers. That is colourful but….they decide torches would better thanks to the advice of a consultant in D-Movie schlock. They organise an angry mob of outraged villagers and…[tension does not mount].
Now that the members of the geological party are asleep on the floor of Dope’s one-room mansion, he selects the conniving woman in the party as his next specimen, syringe to the ready. Dipped into the dry ice bath, she’s dons the rubber mask with ping pong ball eyes. It is an unexpected and unexplained move for him to select the woman of the group. What does that do to the staples of Creature Features? Namely the creature caring off the babe.
When she comes to life, Dope siccs her on the approaching mob. Sicks, indeed. Agar, who barely knows her, appeals to her humanity, she who conspired in the earlier murder of an oilman, and must have been planning Agar’s demise. Had he not read the script? Well, that appeal didn’t work.
The resourceful Agar then tells her she is a monster because of Dr Dope! Good one! She turns on Dope. They struggle and together fall into the alligator pool. We see again for the fourth, or was if the fifth time, stock footage of feeding time at a zoo.
The production values are a film school fail. The mansion is just a house. When Dope drugs the woman he carries a pillow which is supposed to be her back through the living room where the three men in the geological party are sleeping on the floor, kicking and tripping over them, but they sleep on. Sure. Tired out after floating all day.
Yet they are later roused by noises from the very sedate mob. Speaking of that mob, what losers!
The mob comes with torches. With torches! Come on! This is Texas! Where are the AK-47s?
Credit, such as is due, the fact that there are black faces in this production. They are the VooDooing villagers whose dwindling number provided Dope’s unwilling specimens when out after dark. His only henchman is also black.
One drooling NRA member of the geological party assaults a young black women who works as a maid in the mansion and she out smarts him. Good! But not a high bar, outsmarting him.
This is another entry in the Texas film industry from the ego and bankroll of Larry Buchanan whose literal re-make of ‘Zontar: The Thing from Venus’ (1966) set a new standard for zero. It, too, featured Agar. Who else would do it? It was even worse than the tiresome original. Both Zontar pictures are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. ‘Read at your own risk.’
Admission: I watched it because I thought it related to ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ (1954) and his several misadventures in Florida. Wrong!
Sad to say that this is not the end. There followed: ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature’ (1994) and ‘Curse of the Swamp Creature 2’ (1997). I have not yet had the courage to find out any more about them.
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