Swamp Devil - Der Fluch des Monsters

Swamp Devil was not a good movie, but it is not a terrible one either and it could have been much worse. It is decently shot, has some good scenery, has an eerie score and the cast are above average particularly from Bruce Dern and Nicholas Wright. However, the effects are very poor, often crude above all else and the transformation sequences are just as bad. The monster does lack any kind of menace, you know nothing about why it behaves like it does and it is over-used which dilutes any sense of tension. The dialogue is very clunky, while the story rarely does engage often coming across as predictable with no sense of tense atmosphere and any lack of suspense in any scenes featuring the monster and the characters are little more than underdeveloped cardboard cut-outs. All in all, could have been worse, but is lacking in a lot of areas. 4/10 Bethany Cox

This is just Swamp Thing but the focus characters aren't the interesting part of the story.

Imagine a Swamp Thing story focusing on a killer.

Great, now make the point of view character... not Swamp Thing.

Now throw in some murders. Make sure they're pretty much entirely off camera or framed in such a way that we don't have to do much full-body cgi, because it's clearly the entirety of the budget.

I know Swamp Thing is no stranger to murder, but he always at least had a mind (well, not really, he was a bunch of plants inhabited by the green who took the imprint of the thoughts of a dead scientist, thinking they were the scientist) but here it's just the same as your standard "Sharktopus" or "Mega Python".

Watchable but I just can't get over the clear fact that this is just "what if Swamp Thing was mad and not very interesting"

Arriving in a small town, a woman attempting to help clear her father's name who's accused of murder finds the real culprit is a lot more monstrous than she figured and tries to stop it's revenge-fueled rampage.

This was an overall decent creature feature. One of its better features here is the rather fine action scenes here which are quite enjoyable for how frequent they appear in this as the rapid pace becomes very important to these scenes. The opening attack in the forest is highly enjoyable, as the foot chase through the area provides some nice action before the creature emerges for a fine shock kill and eventual discovery, the shots of the posse stalking after the creature in the woods, a series of early attacks with the different parts of the creature come into play with all the vines and tree roots attacking cars and pulling victims along to their deaths in quite graphic fashion all come off rather nicely as these set-up the longer, more involved scenes rather well. The woodland encounter that shows off the creatures' true identity is a big reason for that as it's a truly enjoyable a scene with the triple stand-off, the transformation sequence is stellar as it leads into the frantic firefight and tense stalking of the creature around the forest which is quite fun and a later attack on their cabin features tons of action with the vines crashing through the dilapidated house and chasing them through the house with a flurry of gunshots before leading them away for another great encounter through the woods makes for a great highlight. The finale is another good one, presented as a high- speed chase to put the rather unique weakness into effect for a lengthy action scene as it tries it's tactics to stop them which is quite fun, and all of these action scenes are what move the film along. Given the unique design for the creature as it's a walking tree with plenty of roots and branches sticking out all over so it literally looks like a walking tree and the pretty graphics kills from the high body-count, these are what hold off the few flaws here. The film's biggest factor here is the main plot-point of getting the girl to come out, which makes no sense. There's little reason to believe that having her come out because her father is charged with murdering a local as that doesn't seem all that likely to occur in real-life. That this also leads to plenty of time driving around the town meeting up with the locals who are none too interesting spilling further information about the back- story, or she's interacting at the cabin doing even more investigations which aren't all that enjoyable or make the story any clearer. The last flaw here is the ever-present and continually below-average CGI for the creature. It never looks good, rarely interacts normally within the scene and looks really stilted and quite fake. However, this is to be expected and isn't as big a deal as is normal. These here are what hold this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

A young woman (Cindy Sampson) finds out some disturbing supernatural truths about her father (Bruce Dern), who has been a suspect to multiple murder cases.

This film really had nothing going for it. The story was rather boring, and the effects on the "swamp devil" were not very good. I understand it is low budget, but if you cannot make a decent looking creature, please do not have him running around in plain sight for us to make fun of him.

And, sadly, the twist was predictable early on, with the second twist being just as predictable. Whoever wrote this either did not understand how to be subtle, or the director just did not understand how to craft a story.

I bought this years ago, and enjoyed it far more than I thought I would! The only down side was the dvd had horrible sound distortions every other minute in the first 15 min or so. I picked up a three pack of films tonight that happened to include Swamp Devil, popped it in and it the distortions were gone! Glad someone fixed the error! So if you buy a new copy, you should be good to go!