Les marais de l'enfer

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.

This movie was purchased for 69 cents at a thrift store and we got about 20 minutes into the movie before we agreed that it was a bad watch. That being said, the idea for the movie might be a neat story for a Hollywood remake at some point with someone like Rob Zombie at the helm who might appreciate this sort of camp. Here's the gist, a mutant rodent is out in the swamp killing people. However, a humorous audience will find plenty of 80' s fashion and facial hair to keep you interested for as long as that's your bag. the music is wacky and fun, the cinematography is at times a little "Evil Dead" and the characters keep you missing the Burt Reynolds look. Overall, pretty bad-and not even in a cool way.

"Nutriaman:The Copasaw Creature":who could resist watching the film with such glorious title?A giant mutated nutria is terrorizing Louisiana swamps killing various moonshine drinking yokels,trappers and poachers.The Copasaw bayou is seen through the eyes of the monster.Only the pair of scientists know the truth because they want to create some sort of supernutria for the fur industry.Of course their latest experiment goes wrong.The victims are killed by nutria.Nutriaman or the creature from Copasaw bayou is rarely shown.The acting is pretty good and two fat redneck brothers are fun to watch.An enjoyable monster flick.6 nutrias out of 10.

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.

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.