It Ain't Easy Being Green

[EN: Check out my collected writings on Wes Craven's works in the new "Wes Craven" page on the top bar or right here.]

Year: 1982

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The early 80’s were a tough time for Wes Craven. A decade or so out from his terrifying debut The Last House on the Left, and half that from his grisly but mediocre sophomore effort The Hills Have Eyes, he just wasn’t finding purchase in Hollywood. In 1982 he was only two years off from altering the face of world cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for now his CV boasted the meager one-two punch of Deadly Blessing and Stranger in Our House, a TV movie with Linda Blair (yeah, we’re gonna get to that one).

So when he was offered the opportunity to direct a high profile superhero movie based on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, do you think he would say no? Of course not. Superhero movies didn’t have quite the caché that they do today, but Superman had crushed box office coal into diamonds, so who was Wes Craven to tempt fate? Now, was the grindhouse horror director remotely equipped to handle an action-oriented blockbuster with a studio breathing down his neck and slashing the budget to ribbons so savagely they probably inspired Freddy Krueger?

Of course not.

In Swamp Thing, government scientist Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is sent to a remote research lab in the swamp to replace an injured worker during the last week of the operation. There she meets and becomes enamored with Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), who is working with his sister to create a recombinant cell with both animal and plant DNA for… reasons. Science reasons. When the wicked Dr. Arcane (Louis Jordan) storms the lab to steal the formula, Holland is accidentally coated in it and falls into the swamp. This transforms him into the monstrous Swamp Thing (Dick Durock), and he sets out to save Cable from Arcane’s clutches, while he attempts to recreate the formula and use it on himself.

I mean, wouldn’t YOU want to look like this?

Swamp Thing represents a lot of firsts for Wes Craven. His first superhero movie. His first action movie. His first Wilhelm Scream. Of course, it also represents a lot of lasts because he would never do any of those things again. And while I’m delighted that he got a shot at operating outside of his horror wheelhouse before his single true departure from the genre in 1999’s Music of the Heart, it’s for the best that his action career didn’t go anywhere.

The sequences in the first act that develop character and build the world are pretty solid, but Craven’s script flails once the actual Swamp Thing is introduced. And yes, Craven himself got to write the script on this thing, because literally nobody gave a rat’s ass about overseeing comic book movies in the 80’s. But I digress. Swamp Thing’s powers are ill-defined (we don’t find out a key strength of his until the final 20 minutes, in which Cable sedately repeats it to him as if we should’ve known this the whole time) and his heroism is poorly staged, as Adrienne Barbeau wanders vacantly through the swamp, gets captured, and twiddles her thumbs until he leaps from the reeds to her rescue over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were a damsel in distress.

The action sequences are spectacularly hammy, too. There’s a decent boat chase at one point, but every fistfight is as lumbering and slow as an old Godzilla movie, using that 40’s cinema standby of people falling down even though their opponent’s fist is clearly a foot and a half away from them. What makes this even more embarrassing is that most of the fight scenes involve David Hess, a participant in Craven’s most luridly brutal and realistic depiction of violence, in 1972’s The Last House on the Left. It’s a major stumble for a director who had found his voice, but hadn’t quite locked down his visual mastery yet.

Watching Swamp Thing, it’s almost impossible to believe this was only two years later.

The second and third acts range from boring to dreadful, but when Swamp Thing is good, it’s at least amusingly campy comic book fun. Wise and Barbeau have enough chemistry that I’m willing to go along with their preposterous love story, and though Cable is hardly an empowered female character, she gets a couple opportunities to kick an appropriate amount of ass. Then the comic-y flair comes in with the absurd squiggly wipes Craven uses to transition between scenes. And it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that has a scene where a character grabs the corner of their face and removes their impeccably lifelike Mission: Impossible mask.

Probably the single best element of the film is Jude, a ten-year-old comic relief gas station attendant who accompanies Cable on her Act Two journey. This is almost certainly damning Swamp Thing with faint praise, because he’d probably be the worst thing in any other movie, but the characters (played by Reggie Batts) exemplifies the best of Craven’s occasionally lever, quippy, and warm screenplay. Too bad he’s shunted to the side for a grand finale featuring this masterpiece. 

And I didn’t think any Craven effect could be worse than the werewolf in Cursed.

As you can see, Swamp Thing is no charmer. It’s a parade of shoddy special effects and circuitous narrative, plodding endlessly through a flat, tedious swamp. And the cherry on top is the score by Harry Manfredini, who – as he has with every other film he’s composed since 1980 – liberally slathers the film with shrill outtakes from his Friday the 13th score, smothering it with blunt strings that completely ignore the tone of whatever scene they’re in, blasting it into sub-slasher oblivion. Swamp Thing is a disappointment, but so were most comic movies of that era (Hell, DC is still churning them out). I’m not shifting the blame entirely from Craven, whose hands were all over this project, but the director took a shot at material he was wholly incompatible with. It’s an admirable venture but an unsuccessful one.

TL;DR: Swamp Thing is an admirable failure from a director ill-equipped to handle the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1049

Census Bloodbath: Sexual Hangups

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: Robert Hammer

Cast: Nicholas Worth, Ben Frank, Flo Gerrish

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Here we are! My first official Census Bloodbath post! We're really cooking with gas now! Now, it's true that Don't Answer the Phone has a lot more in common with the 70's grindhouse trend than the 80's slasher genre but it's a clear transitionary film - one of the missing links in the evolutionary chain, if you will. And who can blame it? After all, it came out months before Friday the 13th burst onto the scene.

The film declares itself a Hammer/Castle production, but don't get too excited. That just happens to be the last names of the men who wrote the movie, although I'm sure they appreciated the accidental brand tie-in.

Let me tell you, Don't Answer the Phone was not a good introduction to this slasher retrospective, oh nosiree bob. Following a psychotic photographer who murders and rapes beautiful women and uses their corpses for pornographic photo shoots, there is very little pleasantness to be had. Not that I'm asking for my slasher films to be pleasant, but rape is a huge no-no if you're not going to say something about it. We'll let this one slide (only barely) because it's a cheap ripoff of the highly exploitative grindhouse genre, but man oh man is it hard to watch.

My thoughts on rape in cinema can and have filled much longer articles than this one, so I won't get into it now, but this film does not earn the badge of brutality it wears so proudly.

Nor its title - there's not a lot of phones involved.

In Hollywood, California Dr. Lindsay Gale (Gerrish) runs a radio show where she practices "abnormal psychology" for free. Maybe it's just because I was born in the 90's but this doesn't feel like it's a real thing. She's been receiving calls from a disturbing man who calls himself "Rrrrrrrramon" and suffers from headaches, but apparently he's recently found a nurse who is helping him with his problem.

It turns out the man is Kirk Smith (Worth), the photographer, and the nurse is a candy striper he murdered last night in her home by strangling her with a coin wrapped in pantyhose in the manner of the Viet Cong (apparently). He believes he is some sort of religious avenger

And Bruce Willis impersonator

and he "cleanses" women to purify their souls. This involves pulling down their tops and dripping candle wax on them and laughing like a lunatic. 

It's very hard to like this movie.

Meanwhile Dr. Gale continues to be the worst psychologist ever, telling a debilitatingly shy woman to learn to assert herself but not telling her how (it all works out in the end, she gets murdered) and explaining to a drug addict how awesome heroin is. Kirk keeps calling her show in a series of escalatingly creepy messages, and eventually she joins the detective team trying to track him down.

In her capacity as team psychologist she fails to talk a woman down from the edge in a suicide attempt and fails to talk the killer out of untying her. You'd basically be better off trying to get psychiatric advice from a Zoltar machine. For all this movie's reliance on the psychology of a murderer, its exceedingly loose grasp of the subject systematically destroys any strengths the film might have had.

Also there is a botched romantic subplot where the doctor and the lieutenant bone because while not all the scenes should have to feature women being strangled, apparently five minutes couldn't go by without showing us boobs. 

Don't Answer the Phone is a murder mystery written by a twelve-year-old and doesn't deserve any more credit than that.

Guess whose boobs we get to see. Did you guess both of them? Congratulations, you win! Your prize is never having to watch this movie.

While this movie is a colossal waste of time, it is a curious artifact, hanging on a precipice between a dying 70's genre and a burgeoning 80's one. Most of the grindhouse elements - mountains of naked breasts, rape, and murders perpetrated with sadistic glee - are present, but the slasher elements are starting to poke their little heads out of the shell.

The rape is thankfully mostly offscreen, there is a main girl who survives, and the focus is more on quantity of bodies rather than what is done to them. Not that we can thank Don't Answer the Phone for inventing any of these tropes, but it just goes to show that they were already starting to form in the vacuum of time between 1978's Halloween and 1980's Friday the 13th.

Before I sign off, allow me to give a little bit of credit to the film - the kill sequences are more terrifying than your average slasher because of their pure hard-to-watchiness (Don't pull out your dictionaries on me now) and Worth's grunting, sweaty performance as a truly disgusting and depraved man.

Some may be confused by my relatively high rating for this film considering my generally nasty review, but the movie is at least competently shot and lit, and I know I should leave room for a steep decline in overall quality. Aren't y'all excited? I know I am.

Killer: Kirk "The Strangler" Smith (Nicholas Worth)

Final Girl: Dr. Lindsay Gale (Flo Gerrish)

Best Kill: N/A - all had the same M.O. and all were too upsetting to take any pleasure in.

Sign of the Times: The score sounds something like the Seinfeld theme played on a lightsaber by the bassist from Bon Jovi. For a porno.

Scariest Moment: Kirk kills a prostitute while she's an on-air caller to Dr. Gale's radio show.

Weirdest Moment: A massage parlor is busted by the cops and among the patrons running out is what appears to be Whoopi Golberg in a graduation cap.

Champion Dialogue: "There's enough porn pictures here to sink a battleship."

Body Count: 7; 6 girls raped and murdered, one pimp accidentally shot by the police.

1. A woman is raped and strangled.
2. A woman is raped and strangled.
3. A woman is raped and strangled.
4. A woman is raped and strangled.
5. A pimp is shot by the police.
6. A woman is raped and strangled.
7. A woman is raped and strangled.

TL;DR: Don't Answer the Phone is cheap, exploitative, and its presence at the beginning of the slasher Golden Age is of historical interest, but nevertheless an embarrassment.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1096