Curse of the Swamp Creature

Heading a search for oil, a geologist(John Agar)finds adventure in the form of a mad doctor(Jeff Alexander)who seeks to create a reptile man. Also in the cast are Francine York, Bill Thurman and Shirley McLine. Talk about low budget...some kid gave up his lunch money to make this one. And when you finally get to see a "creature", you bust a gut laughing. Why did they waste color film on this? To be exact, being shot in black & white would've been an asset. This is a must to avoid. Sorry.

I have one question regarding this movie...how much Jesus juice had John Agar consumed before agreeing to appear in this dreadful movie? This has to be the worst movie ever made, even worse than Ed Wood's classic bomb, "Plan Nine from Outer Space". At least with "Plan Nine" you can laugh while watching it. I kept waiting to laugh at how bad this monstrosity was, but it was so boring I couldn't. The acting is atrocious, the plot makes no sense, and the monster is laughable. Some movies are so bad they are great, but this movie isn't one of them. John Agar looks aged and bloated in this movie, and at times seems downright embarrassed. I was embarrassed for him! Even John Agar fans will have a hard time sitting through this one.

Director Larry Buchanan's Curse of the Swamp Creature is a worthy companion to the parade of "swamp-stomping mad scientist trying to shake off meddlesome interloper" films which populate one of horror's tiniest genres. It's not hard to make waves in such a small pond, and Curse of the Swamp Creature certainly doesn't disappoint devoted horror fans, many of whom follow Larry Buchanan as a kind of successor to Schlock horror's undisputed Grand Champion, Ed Wood.

The Curse of the Swamp Creature is that he lives at all. In the murkiest reaches of Louisiana's bayou a reclusive scientist experiments with the genetic map and creates a sort of man-phibian out of one of his apprentices. Meanwhile a cadre of well-meaning interlopers and less-well-meaning con-artists threatens the Doctor's harmonious freak-making activities and themselves become fodder for future human-animal hybrids. If they don't stop him, no one will be safe from "The Curse of the Swamp Creature."

All of the elements of good "bad" cinema are here in spades. Dopey acting, campy dialog, silly monsters, and interior sets that look like someone's Grandma's house got invaded over the weekend and turned into an evil laboratory brimming with everything one would need to do radical genetic engineering. Well, maybe not everything. But he does have an aquarium and some test tubes.

So these people are going thru the jungle/bayou looking for the mad scientist's house, going thru thick leaves they have to cut back, for hours or days...then they come to the mad scientist's house and it has a manicured lawn, a sidewalk leading up to the front door, trimmed bushes, a ranch house like it was from suburbia! Evidently when shooting or editing they had no stock shots of houses so they went next door to some real estate office and snagged one to use.

This is an example of how hilarious this film is - there's more stuff like this in there.

The clothes, the poor make-up and masks...I wonder if when they made these type of "horror films" they knew they would be hilarious.

One of Larry Buchanan's notorious "Azalea" films for TV, this atrociously shot monster movie is a third-rate retread of VOODOO WOMAN, itself a second-rate quickie which wasn't exactly begging for resurrection. It stars John Agar( which usually means John Carradine was sick with the flu) as a swamp-dwelling scientist conducting the usual quack experiments which require fresh corpses. When a group of small-time criminals arrive in this remote little neck of the bayou, they quickly find themselves in quite a bind with the crazed doctor. Meanwhile, the swamp-rat locals beat ceaselessly on their bongos o' voodoo with dazzling inexpertise.

Our mad doctor's dabbling yields a preposterous looking monster(imagine a hard-luck distant cousin of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), and it doesn't even become active until the last five minutes of this plodding, flavorless insult to cinema. Only the most sworn procurers of old-school monster-schlock need apply.

2.5/10. Make-a-doodie-yucky-peeeee-yeeeuw.