Les marais de l'enfer

I am loath to give such low marks to a movie but I had to vote "1" on this one. It was just so very lame. The acting was stilted and choppy, the soundtrack was just awful with very sloppy dubbing and randomly-placed music, and above all, there was very little to be seen of Nutriaman, who appeared to be more of a tallish baboon than anything else. I got quite a few laughs out of this one, but not for the reasons the filmmakers might have intended.

This movie is really really borrrrring. I like crappy monster movies, but this one has nothing to offer. No gimmicks, no nudity, no gore, nada. Basically it's a lot of waiting for something to happen and when it does happen (for 2 seconds), you may blink and miss it. There's so little going on in this movie, I stopped listening to it 15 minutes it. The cover shows the only scene of gore in the movie (some ten minutes into it), and you might as well stop it right then, because the only time you ever see the monster (for like 1 second) it turns out to just be a gorilla suit. So if you want to see something campy, don't watch this. It just sucks and is really borring, and a good waste of explosions.

My review was written in July 1985 after watching the movie on New World video cassette.

"Terror in the Swamp" is a tame horror picture available as a video cassette, bypassing domestic theatrical release. Filmed in Houma, Louisiana, in 1983, pic is typical of low-budget, regional horror filmmaking but is rather skimpy in the shocks and violence area.

The late Billy Holliday, who resembles Dabney Coleman on screen, worte and toplines as game warden Frank. He finds a mangled body on the Copasaw (local swamp area), but can't figure out whether a gator or perhaps a bear killed the man. It turns out that local scientists, funded by South American backers, have been experimenting on breeding a larger nutria (a brown-furred, webbed-foot water rodent) to be used in making fur coats. Inadvertently, a mutated nutriaman has been created and is killing local folks.

While the police, Frank and military authorities hunt the critter, good ol' boys such as the very fat T-Bob (Michael Tedesco) and his brother also head toward Poacher's Cove to kill it. An unsatisfying ending has the monster burned up on a boat.

Director Joseph Catalanotto (who reteamed with Holliday on latter's final film, "French Quarter Undercover") wisely shows the nutriaman only in long shots or obscured through bushes, avoiding a revelation of a phony guy in a hairy outfit. Main interest here is the local color and interesting regional accents of the folksy cast.

Feeling a lot like one of those cruddy bigfoot/sasquatch movies from the '70s (The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Legend of Bigfoot, The Creature from Black Lake), Terror in the Swamp (AKA Nutriaman: The Copasaw Creature) is utterly inept garbage from start to finish.

The majority of the film focusses on either the authorities trying to track down the creature responsible for the spate of grisly deaths in the Copasaw region of Louisiana, or on the hillbilly sadsacks who inhabit the bayou - actual monster action is at an absolute minimum. The result of a scientific experiment gone wrong - a coypu (a large swamp rodent) injected with human hormones - the Nutriaman looks suspiciously like a man in a fancy dress store gorilla costume with added claws. This dreadful regional horror wisely opts to keep the creature out of view, using POV shots, or by carefully concealing it behind foliage.

With ham-fisted direction, a dreadful script, terrible performances, virtually no gore, no gratuitous nudity and no scares, this one would have disappointed anyone unfortunate to see it at the drive-in or grindhouse theatre back in the day. These days, it can disappoint a whole new audience: idiots like me who seek it out on YouTube.

1.5 out of 10, rounded down to 1 for morbidly obese Cajun redneck T-Bob (Michael Tedesco) and irritating swamp hag Crazy Sally (Claudia Wood), both of whom deserve to be ripped to pieces by the nutriaman, but who stay alive.

TERROR IN THE SWAMP was most likely greenlighted after the success of LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, which spawn a new genre and a slew of films that have to do, more or less, with Bigfoot or Sasquatch, or other such mysterious creatures from the cryptozoology field. Unlike BOGGY CREEK, which, in its amateurish way, really scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid, TERROR IN THE SWAMP has absolutely no scary scene in it whatsoever. In fact, the Rednecks populating the landscape are more frightening than the poor bipedal hairy thing that lurks in the swamp.

Now, I don't know if this was meant as some sort of post-modern statement by the makers of this film (I doubt it) but if you call a movie TERROR IN THE SWAMP and sell it as a horror film of sorts but the human characters in it are more frightening than the actual monster advertised on the poster, well there's really something wrong here and I call it false advertising. As a fan of Bigfoot, I needed to see this film. But if you're not a Bigfoot completist, skip it. Your time is worth much more than seeing fat Rednecks arguing, drinking moonshine or blowing up mysterious creatures.