Swamp Thing

I've read a couple of issues of classic Swamp Thing, and own a few. The film Swamp Thing, starring the delectable Adrienne Barbeau as well as Ray 'Leland Palmer" Wise, was directed by the late, great Wes Craven. It co-stars Louis Jourdan, the incomparable and much-lamented late David Hess, as well as Dick Durock as Swamp Thing.

The film begins with confusion and too much dialog (in the sense of conversations of an excess length do not for an action-packed superhero movie make). There's some business about a scientist chased through the swamp by a commando unit (led by David Hess, as "Ferret"), who "put the snake" on the dude, killing him. Adrienne Barbeau plays "Cable" who comes down to the swamp I think at the government's request to investigate, and also to hobnob with Wise ("Alec Holland") and his assistant ("Linda Holland," played by Nanette Brown), who has created a green glowing serum that explodes and causes excess plant growth (think Stephen King's character in Creepshow, which also starred Barbeau).

Cut to the chase, I guess. The commando unit is the private merc force of sinister, Lex Luthor-style supervillain "Arcane" (Louis Jourdan) who has a sleazy, repellent, "I dine at the country club after plotting corporate takeovers and cutting wages" charm to him. They assault the laboratory in the swamp (everyone here seems to have a swamp laboratory), and poor Wise is forced out into the marsh after being covered in the exploding green glow liquid and the next thing you know, he's a dead ringer for the second cousin twice removed to little Melvin in The Toxic Avenger (after Melvin becomes Toxie, ya-understand?).

Swamp Thing takes to the swamp, and Barbeau gets kidnapped by the evil forces of Arcane, who spend the picture just reminding the audience that he's a supervillain straight from a comic book. Hess gets it from Barbeau, and she swims the swampy soupy waters until she and her considerable physical endowments find the Swamp Thing, and then, the rest of the picture commences with mutated dwarf bodybuilders and a boar-snouted, sword-wielding Orc straight from an Eighties D&D adventure module. It's more fun than a barrel full of monkeys on green, Swamp Thing vegetable elixir.

The special effects are bad; one can see the folds and creases in the Swamp Thing's body costume as Swampy does his thing. But, no matter, the film is such rollicking good fun, such a hoot, that it doesn't disturb the viewer that he's spending an hour and a half of his so-precious life watching dreck. Dreck, after all, has its place in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, it becomes apparent that Swamp Thing is played largely for laughs. How can it not be? The comic was created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson, two comic book masters, and a further genius named Frank Miller attempted to blow life back into it. The comic graphic novel one-shot Totems features Swampy in its weirdly prophetic mixture of images, and, since he's so dark and green and everything associated with him is a seemingly icky mutation, I have trouble visually discerning just what the hell he's doing there. Something to do with spreading his spores.

The film, in different hands (say Cronenberg) might have focused more on this "body horror" aspect of the Swamp Thing saga. Craven doesn't, rendering the movie little more than passable drive-in pap. It would be two years before Craven would redeem himself, blowing nearly every other horror movie franchise out of the water with his razor-tipped glove-wielding dream demon, the wisecracking Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Every creative artist, a professor once told me, is entitled to a few slip-ups or in-between bananas while waiting to produce the next solid, masterful work. Swamp Thing isn't Citizen Kane, and it isn't even A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it is entertaining. That alone is sufficient.