Love After Death (1968)

Love After Death (also released as Unsatisfied Love) is a 1968 Argentinian erotic horror movie and it’s pretty crazy. Which is a good thing.

We start with a man named Montel being buried alive in a very Poe-esque scene. He’s subject to cataleptic fits and it appears that nobody checked to make sure he was really dead. He manages to claw his way out of the grave and as you might imagine he is not a happy camper.

Meanwhile Sofia, his wife of three months (now supposedly his widow), and his doctor are making plans for their life together. It’s pretty clear that poor Montel was deliberately buried alive.

Sofia assures the doctor (Dr Anderson) that she is still a virgin. Montel can’t perform in the bedroom because he’s terrified of sex.

Montel, back in the land of living, goes looking for women. He wants to prove to himself that there’s nothing wrong with him and that he’s quite capable of having sex. His first attempts are unsuccessful but then he picks up a pretty brunette and everything goes smoothly.

Montel has figured out that he was the victim of a plot by his wife and doctor and he has a score to settle with them. They’re already getting nervous after being informed by a police inspector that Montel’s grave is empty.

A large part of the movie is taken up by Montel’s pursuit of women and then the thriller plot starts to kick in. Dr Anderson decides that it’s essential to get Montel out of the way and to make sure he’s really dead this time. He’s a bit of a strange doctor. He has a couple of strongarm men working for him and they’re despatched to take care of Montel.

This leads to a shootout in the woods.

The opening burial sequence is quite effectively creepy but aside from that there’s not a huge amount of horror content. This is more of a deranged erotic thriller than a true erotic horror movie. There’s very little blood and there’s no gore.

There is nudity and sex, in copious quantities. It’s about as explicit as a typical 1968 US sexploitation movie, in other words it’s fairly tame but there are lots of naked ladies.

The acting is so-so. Guillermo De Córdova is quite effective as Montel, giving an odd detached performance which may have been due to a lack of acting ability but it ends up being quite appropriate. And he’s a weedy little guy with a subtly creepy look, which helps.

Love After Death is totally different from European erotic horror movies. It has a very similar feel to American sexploitation movies of this era. The look of the film, the grainy black-and-white cinematography, the tone, the craziness, the incoherence of the plot, the fact that it seems to have been made without synchronised sound (with a small amount of dialogue dubbed later), the amount of skin on display and the whole ambience make it very easy to mistake for a US sexploitation feature. In fact it fits fairly well into the roughie sub-genre.

It’s actually quite reminiscent of Doris Wishman’s wonderful off-the-wall voodoo nudie movie Indecent Desires (1967).

Love After Death seems to have been shot entirely in the United States (in fact in New York) and there is considerable doubt as to whether it really is an Argentinian movie.

The ending comes totally out of left field but it works for me.

Love After Death is pleasingly nutty and weird and very enjoyable. Highly recommended.

This movie was released on a triple-feature disc from Something Weird along with The Incredible Petrified World (a bad sci-fi movie that is unfortunately very dull indeed) and The Atomic Brain AKA Monstrosity (which is enjoyable sci-fi silliness). Love After Death gets a fullframe transfer (which is totally correct) which is reasonably good considering that it’s surprising this movie survives at all.

Aenigma (1987)

I’ve recently developed a bit of an interest in 1980s eurocult movies, especially 80s Italian genre movies. I’ve long been a fan of 1960s/70s eurocult films but I had rarely ventured into the 80s. And I’ve started to get interested in late period Lucio Fulci movies. Which is how I come to be reviewing his 1987 offering Aenigma. This was an Italian-Yugoslav co-production.

Within the first ten minutes one thing becomes crystal clear. This is going to be one weird movie. Which is OK, I like weird movies.

It starts at an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Boston. Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) has two strikes against her. Firstly, she’s poor. Secondly, she’s unpopular. But at this school being poor automatically makes a girl unpopular. Kathy is not merely poor, she is the daughter of the school’s maid Mary (Dusica Zegarac). Being the daughter of a servant is the ultimate social faux pas. The other girls along with hunky gym teacher Fred (Riccardo Acerbi) play a particularly cruel prank on Kathy. It ends with Kathy lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Which causes the other girls even more amusement.

Dr Robert Anderson (Jared Martin) is the neurologist treating Kathy. He sees very little reason for hope. Kathy appears to have no brain activity whatsoever. She is to all intents and purposes brain-dead. Except that something is happening. It’s not like normal brain activity but it seems to be some uncanny emotional response. Dr Anderson is disturbed and the nurse is totally freaked out.

Shortly afterwards a new girl arrives at the school. Her name is Eva (Lara Lamberti). She tells her roommate that her one ambition is to have sex with as many cute guys as possible. She decides to start with Fred.

Then seriously bizarre things start to happen at the school. Bizarre fatal things.

And what’s going on with Eva? She seems odd, but in a subtle sort of way.

Then things start to get clarified. We figure out the basics of what’s going on although we have no idea how it’s happening. And there are still some more weird things that will get thrown at us.

Bad things are going to happen to a lot of girls at the school. It’s like a revenge movie, but Kathy is now a vegetable so who is the avenger?

There’s an obvious connection to Carrie, and to Patrick. Borrowing ideas from other movies is fine provided you then do something totally different with those same ideas. In this case Fulci takes basic ideas from those movies and then does seriously weird and fascinating stuff with them. It’s not the ideas that matter in a movie, it’s the execution of those ideas. And the execution here bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original sources.

This is Fulci getting seriously surreal and twisted. Aenigma is unsettling and perplexing but it’s unsettling and perplexing in a way that is original and distinctive.

The acting is mostly rather flat but that works in the movie’s favour. This is not a character-driven horror movie or a psychological horror movie. The characters really don’t matter. The one cast member whose performance stands out is Lara Lamberti (or Lara Naszinski as she was also known). It’s not that her acting is all that great but she really does manage to be disturbing and strange and that’s exactly what the part requires.

Fulci pulls off plenty of creepy scary visual set-pieces. Fulci might not have quite the artistic baroque touch of an Argento but his set-pieces here are weirder and cleverer. The visuals overall have a nicely spooky feel, but subtly spooky.

Personally I like this movie more than I like Carrie even though I’m a De Palma fan.

Fulci wisely doesn’t offer us explanations for the events in the story. We’re left to ourselves to figure out what it all means and how these things could have happened.

The movie was shot in Sarajevo.

By 1987 Italian genre directors were working on shoestring budgets which presumably explains the co-production deal. Shooting in Yugoslavia would have been a lot cheaper than shooting in Italy. The fact that it’s set in Boston doesn’t matter much. Presumably this was an attempt to give it more appeal to the American market. The movie really takes place in a nightmare world in which reality plays little part.

Fulci manages to be visually inventive and the incredibly tight budget isn’t as much of a problem as you might fear.

From what I’ve seen of his 80s work I’d say that far from being in a creative decline Fulci was just starting to reach his peak. The strange disturbing masterpiece that is Aenigma came just a year after the strange disturbing masterpiece that is The Devil’s Honey. I have to say that most Fulci fans don’t seem to rate Aenigma very highly but it’s the sort of movie that really appeals to me and I loved it.

Severin have released this movie on both DVD and Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent and there are some cool extras including a commentary track by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson.

Aenigma is very highly recommended.

The Curse of the Hidden Vault (1964)

The Curse of the Hidden Vault (German title Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss) is a 1964 Edgar Wallace krimi from Rialto.

The opening sequence is pleasingly clever and witty.

The real story begins with the arrival in London of Kathleen Kent (Judith Dornys). She has been living in Australia. She is accompanied by a law student from Sydney, a Mr Westlake, who claims to be her legal advisor and bodyguard. Since he’s played by Eddi Arent we tend to doubt his competence in either of these rôles.

Kathleen and Westlake are taken to their hotel where they discover they are prisoners. It takes them, and the audience, a while to start getting some idea of what is going on. Twenty years earlier a casino operator named Real (Rudolf Forster) cheated Kathleen’s father out of his entire fortune. Real is now old and he feels guilty about his past misdeeds. He summoned Kathleen to London to make amends. He intends to restore her father’s fortune to her.

So Real is a bad guy but maybe he has now become a good guy. Real’s assistant is a barrister named Spedding. We don’t know if he’s really a good guy or not.

We assume that Connor and his associates, the men who are holding Kathleen prisoner, are definitely bad guys. But what about Jimmy Flynn? Jimmy seems very friendly with all the crooks but he’s also very friendly with Inspector Angel (Harry Meyen) from Scotland Yard. The crooks don’t know whether to trust Jimmy, and nor does Inspector Angel. Nor, for that matter, does the viewer.

And then there’s the mysterious George (Klaus Kinski), who keeps floating about silently. We have no idea whose side he’s on.

Apart from trying to figure out how to distinguish the good guys from the bad we also have to consider the very real possibility that some of the good guys will try double-cross other good guys and some of the bad guys will undoubtedly double-cross some of their fellow bad guys.

To add another complication, there’s an unknown sniper who shoots people from time to time.

Real’s fortune is kept in a secret vault protected by ingenious, imaginative and apparently impregnable security devices. Everybody would like to know how to get into that vault and out again while staying alive.

Several people have already been murdered (one of them was murdered in three different ways simultaneously) so this is a rather dangerous game.

The fact that the chief of Scotland Yard, Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg), is taking a personal interest in the case naturally gives us those of us who have seen him in action in other krimis no confidence at all.

Judith Dornys as Kathleen Kent is clearly the heroine and she’s likeable enough if not particularly memorable. We’re not sure if the hero will turn out to be Inspector Angel or Jimmy Flynn, or maybe somebody else. We’re not sure who will turn out to be the real villain.

Harald Leipnitz as Jimmy Flynn is reasonably good. Siegfried Schürenberg grown on me more and more. Klaus Kinski looks suitably mysterious and sinister.

The plot twists and turns all over the place, which is what you want in a krimi.

Franz Josef Gottlieb does a solid job and throws in some nice visual set-pieces.

Visually the movie is impressive and imaginative, especially the wonderful hidden vault complex sets.

This movie was shot in black-and-white and in Ultrascope, one of those cheaper Cinemascope equivalents that were popular at that time.

The Tobis Blu-Ray transfer looks terrific. It offers the options of the English dubbed version or the German language version with English subtitles. It is always a good idea to avoid the English dubbed versions of krimis.

The Curse of the Hidden Vault is a typical krimi and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t break any new ground but it delivers the pleasures that you expect from this genre. Highly recommended.

The Island of the Fishmen (1979)

The Island of the Fishmen AKA Island of Mutations (original Italian title L'isola degli uomini pesce) is a 1979 horror film directed by Sergio Martino. It was released in the US by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in a heavily edited form (including a great deal of newly shot footage replacing existing footage) under the title Screamers.

It is 1891 and a French prison ship has sunk, presumably somewhere in the Caribbean. There are a dozen or so survivors but their troubles have just begun. Something drags their lifeboat towards an island. They assume it’s a current but we have seen enough to know that there’s something sinister in the sea.

Half a dozen men make it to the beach but before long only three remain alive, the ship’s medical officer Lieutenant Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli) and two prisoners.

One of the prisoners is convinced that this is a voodoo island. He’s at least partially correct.

They think their troubles are over when a beautiful young woman rides up on horseback but she informs them that the island belongs to Mr Rackham and that he does not like trespassers and they would be well advised to leave. They will later discover that the woman is Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).

They make their way to the house of Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson) and he seems inclined to be hospitable.

There’s tension in the house between Amanda and Mr Rackham. He clearly has romantic designs on her and she most definitely does not reciprocate his feelings. The household also includes a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira (Beryl Cunningham), and she seems to feel a certain attraction to Rackham. There are other voodoo priestesses on the island and Rackham has a small private army of presumably Haitian warriors.

There are monstrous things living in the swamps and in the sea. They seem to be half man and half fish. Everyone on the island is aware of them and they don’t seem too worried. Claude on the other hand is very worried.

As one might have predicted a romance blossoms between Claude and Amanda. Gradually Claude learns the truth about what Rackham is up to on the island, and he also discovers that his services as a doctor are required. Rackham needs him to keep an old man alive. The old man is Amanda’s father Professor Ernest Marvin (Joseph Cotten). The professor had been involved in a scandal some years earlier, a scandal involving horrifying medical experiments. Rackham has good reasons for needing Professor Marvin’s services.

Just as Claude has put all the pieces of the puzzle together he finds that there are important things he did not know and those things change the picture completely.

Professor Marvin, Rackham and Shakira are all mad, but mad in different ways. Somehow Claude has to find a way to save Amanda. And there’s a time factor - this is a volcanic island and the volcano seems to be getting much more active.

The script obviously uses The Island of Dr Moreau as a jumping-off point but pretty soon the story starts developing in rather different directions. There are hints of certain well-known legends and some very definite Lovecraftian elements but I don’t want to risk spoilers by saying any more.

Richard Johnson is excellent as the sinister obsessed Rackham. Claudio Cassinelli plays the hero rôle pretty well and Barbara Bach is a fine spirited heroine (and she adds some glamour).

The movie has a definite steampunk feel. There are occasionally cheesy moments but the Italians had a knack for making cheesiness stylish. And mostly it isn’t that cheesy. The special effects work pretty well. The fishmen are obviously guys in rubber suits but they look fine. The sets are great. As low budget movies go this one looks terrific.

This isn’t really a horror movie. It’s more like a mutated version of a late 19th century scientific romance with some horror thrown in.

This movie doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation which might be a consequence of that heavily altered US version referred to earlier. This movie is so much fun. You’re not supposed to take it seriously. It’s a romp and it’s done with style and energy. Very highly recommended.

Full Moon’s Blu-Ray release is barebones but the transfer is excellent.

So Sweet...So Perverse (1969)

So Sweet...So Perverse (Così dolce... così perversa) was the second of the series of gialli made by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker. It was released in 1969.

Jean Reynaud (Jean-Louis Trintignant) lives in a swank Paris apartment with his wife Danielle (Erika Blanc). Their marriage could best be described as an armed truce. They don’t sleep together. Jean has affairs. At the moment he’s having an affair with a married woman, Helene Valmont (Helga Liné).

Jean is chronically bored. He is always searching for something, anything, to relieve his boredom.

The apartment on the top floor, just above theirs, has just been rented by an American woman. We will soon find out that this is Nicole Perrier (Carroll Baker). Jean notices her immediately. He always notices beautiful women.

Then he hears sounds from Nicole’s apartment. It sounds like a violent argument between a man and a woman and the woman sounds frightened. Jean races upstairs but Nicole’s apartment is locked and no-one will answer the door.

Then Jean remembers that he has a key to that upstairs apartment. It had been given to him when the apartment was untenanted and he had forgotten to return it. He heads upstairs again and lets himself in. He finds Nicole in an agitated state, but she refuses his offers of help.

Jean doesn’t think too much more about the incident but the following day he spots Nicole in the street. He follows her, to a photographic studio. He hears another violent argument. Nicole bursts out of the door, again very agitated, and asks Jean to take her away from there.

When he finally persuades her to talk she tells him about Klaus and about how much she hates him, but she can’t break away from him. Klaus is cruel and brutal and twisted and sadistic. But Nicole keeps going back to him. He excites her.

This should have been a red flag for Jean, but Jean thinks of himself as a sophisticated man of the world and as a man who can handle any situation. He doesn’t want to admit that he might be getting out of his depth with Nicole.

He will soon discover just how far out of his depth he already is.

He has fallen hard for Nicole. They begin an affair. Danielle is jealous and upset. Jean did not expect that. It is possible that Jean is one of those men who doesn’t understand women anywhere near as well as he thinks he does.

Jean and Danielle set off for a romantic getaway but the bad news is that Klaus has tracked them down.

Then the plot twists start to come thick and fast and they’re delightfully twisted and nasty. You can't take anybody in this movie at face value.

This movie belongs to an incredibly interesting period in the history of the giallo. Mario Bava had made a full-blown giallo in 1964, Blood and Black Lace, but it failed to start a trend. Then, right at the tail end of the 60s, came a number of movies in which you can see the giallo beginning to emerge as a distinct genre but with a slightly different feel to the movies that followed in the wake of Dario Argento’s 1970 Bird with the Crystal Plumage. These late 60s movies were all about sex, decadence, betrayal and murder among the rich and glamorous (what was known at the time as the Jet Set). These movies included Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (1969) as well as the first couple of Umberto Lenzi-Carroll Baker gialli.

So Sweet...So Perverse taps into the same vein of decadence, betrayal and murder.

The screenplay was mostly the work of Ernesto Gastaldi and that’s a major plus. His screenwriting credits include such gems as the excellent gothic horror The Long Hair of Death and important gialli including The Sweet Body of Deborah, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key as well as the fascinating Secrets of a Call Girl (AKA Anna, The Pleasure, The Torment, 1973).

Carroll Baker is of course fabulous. But Jean-Louis Trintignant and Erika Blanc are just as good and their characters are just as important. Helga Liné is good also and Horst Frank is wonderfully sinister. This really is a great cast.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes a fine audio commentary by Kat Ellinger.

So Sweet...So Perverse is highly recommended.

Modesty Blaise (1966) revisited

When I first saw Joseph Losey’s 1966 Modesty Blaise movie fifteen years ago I had never read a Modesty Blaise novel and had never set eyes on a Modesty Blaise comic-strip. I was of course vaguely aware of her as a comic-strip character but I had no feelings whatsoever one way or the other about the character. Since then I have read several of the novels and quite a few of the comic-strip adventures and I am now a confirmed Modesty Blaise fan. Which means that my reactions to the movie might now be quite different.

The first thing to say is that the comic-strip character Modesty Blaise, as created by Peter O’Donnell in 1963, is most emphatically not a female James Bond. She bears no resemblance whatsoever to Bond. She is not British, she is not a professional spy, she is not in any way shape or form part of the British Establishment. She is a retired super-criminal. She feels no remorse for her very successful criminal career. She does not take orders from anybody. She does jobs for Scotland Yard and for the British intelligence services but she is strictly a freelancer.

She is in fact much closer to being a female Simon Templar. She belongs to the literary tradition of the lone wolf rogue hero. It’s also worth mentioning that the novels and comic-strips are fairly serious spy/crime adventures. They are not spoofs.

It should also be pointed out that Modesty is not English. She is a British subject by marriage but her ethnicity is a mystery, even to herself. She has blocked out all memories of her nightmarish childhood. Given what we learn about her background and give the way she looks in the comic strip we might hazard a guess that she is either Slavic or southern European. Casting an Italian actress in the role was in fact quite appropriate, and Monica Vitti’s accent is not inappropriate either. There are major problems with Miss Vitti’s casting, but her nationality is not one of them.

The plot is wildly incoherent. Losey threw away Peter O’Donnell’s screenplay. O’Donnell had the last laugh - he turned his screenplay into the first Modesty Blaise novel and had a huge success with it while Losey’s movie bombed. Having thrown away the original screenplay Losey then made constant alterations to the new version. It’s possible that Losey thought that having a script that made no sense would be inherently funny.

Such as it is, the plot involves 50 million pounds’ worth of diamonds which have to be delivered as a bribe from the British Government to an Arab oil sheikh. Someone is trying to steal the diamonds. The British intelligence services have achieved nothing save for getting their top agent killed and in desperation they turn to Modesty Blaise and her partner Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp).

The man trying to steal the diamonds is super-villain Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde), with whom Modesty has tangled before. Gabriel makes various attempts to get the diamonds while British Intelligence suspects that Modesty might try to steal them herself. That’s it for the plot.

Of course in 1966 when the movie was made Bond Fever was at its height and there was obviously going to be enormous pressure to transform Modesty into a female James Bond and to make the movie as much like a Bond film as possible.

Director Joseph Losey had other ideas. What exactly his ideas were is difficult to say. He clearly had no understanding of the spy genre or the Bond films or the eurospy movies that had started to appear around this time. It’s also obvious that he had zero interest in making a movie that had any genuine connection at all with the Modesty Blaise comic-strip. It’s as if he decided to satirise the Bond films without actually having seen any of them, and to satirise the comic-strip without ever having read it. To spoof something successfully you need to understand it, and preferably you need to love it.

The movie turned out to be a trainwreck, but it’s a morbidly fascinating trainwreck. Losey was going for a surreal Pop Art confection and his total unsuitability for this directing job perversely makes it more surreal and psychedelic. You don’t know what’s going to happen next because Losey had no idea what was going to happen next either.

There are some wonderful Op Art visuals. The sets manage to look groovy and psychedelic. Modesty’s clothes, hairstyle and even hair colour change without any explanation in the middle of scenes. Losey presumably thought this was incredibly funny and clever. It isn’t. It’s just weird. But the weird elements injected into the movie for no reason at all add to the movie’s perverse fascination.

Monica Vitti lacks the athleticism and energy that the role required but maybe that’s why Losey wanted her - to make the movie an anti-Modesty Blaise movie rather than a Modesty Blaise movie. Terence Stamp is equally miscast as Willie Garvin.

There are compensations. Dirk Bogarde’s outrageously arch and camp performance is delicious. Harry Andrews is excellent as Tarrant, the British Intelligence chief. Clive Revill is very funny as Gabriel’s miserly Scottish accountant McWhirter. Rossella Falk is both amusing and slightly unsettling as Gabriel’s sadistic henchwoman (as possibly lover) Mrs. Fothergill.

The action scenes are not particularly exciting.

On the plus side this is a visually stunning and outrageous movie in a delirious Swinging 60s way. It’s worth seeing just for the visual delights.

Despite its flaws this movie is very much worth seeing. There’s no other movie quite like it. A movie from an era when studios would take risks on wildly unconventional totally crazy movies, and Modesty Blaise captures so much of the craziness of the 60s, a craziness that was so much more fun than the craziness of today. It’s not a Modesty Blaise movie and it’s a deeply flawed movie but it’s flaws are what makes it weirdly fascinating. With those thoughts in mind it’s recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth, Last Day In Limbo and I, Lucifer. They’re very much worth reading. And I've reviewed the early Modesty Blaise comics (in the collection The Gabriel Set-Up) which are also excellent

Swamp Thing (1982)

Swamp Thing is Wes Craven’s 1982 adaptation of the popular DC comic.

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in reviewing this movie since I have never set eyes on a Swamp Thing comic. In fact my knowledge of American comics is close to zero and I have never ever read a superhero comic. I therefore have absolutely no idea how close this movie is to the spirit of the comic.

Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is a scientist who has just arrived at a research station deep in the swamplands somewhere or other. She also seems to be an agent for one of those sinister Washington intelligence agencies. 

Idealistic if slightly creepy genius scientist Dr Alec Holland (Ray Wise) is working on some hush-hush project involving plants. Washington is taking a keen interest in the project, and that’s always a worry.

Alec is working on a special formula with his sister, Dr Linda Holland (Nannette Brown). He thinks he can create plant-animal hybrids.

There’s a vague uneasy kind of attraction between Alice Cable and Alec Holland. She’s not entirely sure about him but she is fascinated.

There are bad guys with guns and they want Dr Holland’s secrets.

That formula is explosive, literally. And the explosion does something unexpected. It turns Alec Holland into a monstrous plant-animal hybrid. He becomes Swamp Thing.

The bad guys are in the pay of a megalomaniacal criminal mastermind, Arcane (Louis Jourdan). Arcane doesn’t just want the formula, he wants Swamp Thing captured as well. But how do you capture an invulnerable monster?

At this stage nobody knows that Swamp Thing is actually Alec Holland.

The bad guys are after Alice Cable as well. They think she has a vital notebook in her possession. Swamp Thing keeps saving her but it takes her a while to figure out that he’s a good monster rather than an evil monster, and it also takes her a while to realise that he is Dr Holland.

Of course a Beauty and the Beast style emotional bond develops between Alice and Swamp Thing.

There’s lots of action and narrow escapes as Arcane figures out that the only way to capture Swamp Thing is by using Alice as bait. And Alice and Swamp Thing have to prevent Arcane from using that formula.

Given that the comic originated in the 1970s it’s not surprising that there’s a certain amount of characteristic 70s paranoia in this movie.

Given that I’m unfamiliar with the comic I might be on shaky ground here but I suspect that many of the movie’s problems were inherent in the source material. Invulnerable monsters and heroes are not that interesting. An invulnerable hero with superpowers doesn’t have to figure out clever ways of escaping from chains or taking on a dozen armed bad guys. He just uses his invulnerability and unstoppability, which is a bit boring. His invulnerability also means that we never really feel that Swamp Thing and Alice are in real danger, so there’s a lack of suspense and dramatic tension.

There’s a bit too much reliance on what is really out-and-out magic (such as Swamp Thing’s healing powers) which means that several potentially poignant scenes lose any genuine impact. And Swamp Thing is just a bit too brave and noble.

Adrienne Barbeau is very good. She makes Alice a likeable heroine. She’s a Strong Female Character without being strident and without being perfect. She makes a few mistakes (she should have been a lot less trusting early on). By this stage of his career Louis Jourdan was playing villains quite often and it’s something he did very well. His smooth charm and sophistication made his villains extra scary. He made a very good Dracula in the BBC’s Count Dracula and he was a memorable Bond villain in Octopussy (one of my favourite Bond movies).

I love the swamp settings and Craven uses them very well. The effects are fairly good. Swamp Thing is of course a guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster, but I love guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters.

Swamp Thing doesn’t quite come off but it’s reasonable entertainment. Recommended, with a few reservations. It looks nice on Blu-Ray and the disc includes an audio commentary by Wes Craven (who is quite realistic about the fact that the film was not a complete success).