Lousy Lottery 33: The Return of Swamp Thing
Welcome, friends, to the Lousy Lottery! Here’s how it works. First, I post four movies to a poll on Twitter. Fans vote to pick which movie to make me watch that week. I watch it, review it and spread the word about an amazingly awful, terribly terrific b-horror flick.
This is week 33! This week we step into the mind of madman filmmaker Jim Wynorski with 1989’s The Return of Swamp Thing! But first, let’s talk plot.
Our film begins with a wonderful animated montage of Swamp Thing comic covers set to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Born on the Bayou. In the very first moment after this fantastic title sequence is a group of men wandering waist deep in the swamp looking for some hidden sill. They’re all carrying full automatic machine guns of the AR-15 variety. I grew up in the swamplands and in Texas with a lifetime of gun handling behind me. This moment with these men was brief, but it burst the bubble of disbelief for me immediately. Their trigger discipline and gun handling drove me nuts! They fucking pointed the guns at each other while talking, all nonchalant. Also, swamps are full of poisonous snakes, terrible spiders and all sorts of things that can kill you.
The idea of walking around in the swamp waist deep in the middle of the night is like telling nature, “hey, nature, come fuck me up!” Shivers. Okay, anyway, soapbox time over. Still! Anyway, some monstrous half-human-half-dunno creature starts hunting the men and taking them out one by one. While we don’t quite know what this monster is, we do know he’s not the only ghoul in the bog. For out of the smoke and muck comes a hero monster, a swamp thing! Up from the waters rises our hero, Swamp Thing, who makes quick work of our deformed foe and helps the one surviving guy make it to safety.
The evil scientist from the first movie, Dr. Arcane, spent the first movie fascinated with Swamp Thing, trying to tap into his power. He also fell in love with and married a young woman, who later left the evil doctor for Swamp Thing. He didn’t love that. Fast forward to the movie at hand and we see that Dr. Arcane has built a sort of compound out of a plantation and filled the grounds with dangerous men and women showing a ton of guns and a lot of skin. Are they keeping people out? Or are they just a precaution in case Swamp Thing returns?
No longer is Dr. Arcane obsessed with tapping into Swamp Thing’s power. Now, he’s trying to engineer his own swamp thing but bizarrely not to gain power but because he thinks it will give him youth and immortality. Why, you ask? Uh, well, no clue. I mean, it’s not like Swamp Thing is particularly young looking and, hell, he’s played by a man in his fifties. But, whatever, that’s what he’s doing. He just can’t get the formula right and his monstrosities seem only to want to kill. In case you haven’t guessed, that disgusting beast from the swamp, no not Swamp Thing, the other one, is one of the doc’s creations and serves as a prime example of why Swamp Thing had to kick it’s ass.
Meanwhile, for reasons they don’t really go into, that blonde woman Dr. Arcane married apparently had a daughter and that daughter wants answers as to her mother’s disappearance. Why now? No clue. Why not before? Dunno. Why wasn’t she there in the first movie? Ok, enough questions! While his own creations weren’t working out, perhaps there’s hope if he can splice into the actual Swamp Thing. Maybe the reappearance of the daughter of Swamp Thing’s love will lure him into a trap! Maybe the doc can finally succeed! Nah, just kidding, that’s far too understandable a plot progression. Instead he tries to use some really questionable science to steal the daughter’s essence to grow younger. Hey, look, I didn’t write it. The doc pulling these shenanigans does indeed lure Swamp Thing out, but they don’t pounce on him and do experiments, they just shoot at him until he leaves.
When this movie came out, I was 10 years old. I grew up in the swamplands by the Gulf of Mexico. When I saw this movie, in all it’s swampy goodness, it felt right, it felt like home and I was totally in love. I read Swamp Thing comics, got toys and was super into it. I have no clue how many times I watched this movie as a kid. Later in life, I began to realize that maybe I wasn’t a fan of Swamp Thing as much as a fan of Jim Wynorski. I truly believe no one on earth has a more diverse filmography than Wynorski. It includes everything from whole family film series to horror to fantasy to full on porn. No, I’m not kidding, he has directed porn parodies of horror movies with such gems on his filmography as The Bare Wench Project, The Hills have Thighs and House on Hooter Hill.
Now, kid me didn’t watch the porn, but Wynorski’s movies in the ‘80s had a formula that just worked for me. His ‘80s movies are fun, fully of silly acting, full of tons of guns, gore and guts and with more than a fair share of nudity. In other words, they are silly, gory, fun and naughty. This formula worked for me and the fact that he applied it to so many different kinds of movies, I had no idea the same made genius was behind them all. Chopping Mall? Jesus, I watched it almost daily and had a poster of it on my bedroom wall! Deathstalker II? A fantasy favorite that I am pretty sure I could quote verbatim. Sorceress, Big Bad Mama II, Screw Balls, Forbidden World? I loved them all. None, however, was closer to my heart than The Return of Swamp Thing.
Swamp Thing has a shocking lack of nudity, but it hits all the other Wynorski notes. The acting is chock full of cheesy lines and exaggerated reactions. While Oscar winner and film icon Louis Jordan really brought the level of skill and class way up in the acting, the corny acting by the rest of the cast worked perfectly and seemed a perfect fit for Heather Locklear. Her mix of ditzy chatterbox and witty fast thinker fit the character like a glove and, I’ll be honest, despite seeing this movie countless times, I forgot she was in it, which is a major testament to how lost in this character she got. She ended up winning the Razzie award that year for Worst Actress for this role. I’m not sure I quite get casting the 50-year-old Dick Durock as the muscle-bound, bad guy fighting protagonist, but, then again, realism isn’t the goal in this flick.
No, it’s not about realism, it’s about balls-to-the-wall ‘80s action fun. Scantily clad women guard a plantation with sub-machine guns. Inside that plantation is a British-accented mad scientist, with a lab full of bloops and bleeps and bubbling concoctions. Hell, he is the Bond villain from Octopussy and his right hand assistant is the villain from Superman II, also with a ‘scary’ British accent. Those scantily clad bodyguards fire endless rounds of everything from grenade launchers to automatic weapons at Swamp Thing and in true ‘80s fashion don’t even come close to hitting him. We even get an ending where the hero gets the girl and literally walks off into the sunset. The Return of Swamp Thing is quintessential ‘80s Wynorski.
My favorite ‘80s trope from this movie, though, has to be the two kids who serve as comic relief. Daryl and Omar, played to absolute perfection by Daniel Emery Taylor and RonReaco Lee respectively, are those two kids in many ‘80s movies who are somehow more worldly and more capably than all the adults in the movie. They curse, they look at nudie magazines and they do a better job fighting the baddies than most. In Swamp Thing, those kids, Daryl and Omar, have more chemistry than MiT and are like the prequel to Bobby Hill and Joseph. I’m not kidding, these kids make the movie worth the watch. They’re just, well, just a fucking delight and are hilarious. I have no clue how a master of sleaze like Wynorski was able to get such great performances out of children, but here we are.
I absolutely adore this movie, but it certainly fits the bill of a b-movie. As one critic wrote at the time that the movie, “opts for cheap nostalgic laughs and camp '50s sci-fi scenery; depending on whether you find this funny, you'll either smile knowingly or gasp in disbelief." Wynorski was given 30 days to shoot the whole film and only ended up using 27 of it. He was given a budget of roughly $4million and the movie grossed just under $200k at the box office. So, in the end, is it Schindler’s List? No, not it isn’t. What it is is a classic ‘80s action flick, full of guns, gore, bizarre scientists, evil villains and more than one buxom babe. If you have a hankering for a true blast from the past, this is the movie for you. Catch it now on Tubi, Prime or in your Gen-X uncle’s VHS collection.
Also, don’t forget to see what’s coming next in the Lousy Lottery. Make sure you tune into Twitter later today and vote for Lousy Lottery 34! My handle is @MrJosh79, look for it and don’t forget to vote!
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