As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.
Having compared the 1982 movie to a Disney film take on a B-movie story in my original review, I would compare Return to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles take on it: brightly-coloured, snarky, cheap, and flimsy. Spearheading this new take is director Jim Wynorski, a Roger Corman student and director of over 150 movies, which range in genre from monster movie to action to children’s film to softcore parody (which might have been presaged by the prevalence of very loose clothing on some of the women in this movie), but don’t necessarily range much in budget or artistic value—his most prolific contributions to cinema include the likes of Chopping Mall, Ghoulies IV, and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. With Wynorksi at the helm, we have movie where every tableau, even the outdoor scenes filmed around the bogs of Georgia, look plastic and fake, where a mad scientist’s lab looks right out of a Saturday morning cartoon, where explosions and rubber monster suits are doled out with reckless abandon, and all the while the movie feels like it has this snide smirk on its face, saying “Hey, did you get a load of that?”
As I wrote about in my Tremors piece, comedy is one way that more modern films that hearken back to the cheap genre programmers of the past can deflect derision, and that is very, very evident here, in a film that in its wilful embrace of pure camp seems to to be begging the audience to mock it, while always letting them know that it’s in on the joke—it’s stupid, and it knows it. While Craven’s movie had its moments of beauty and pathos, asking us to sympathize with its plant man protagonist much in the way you would sympathize with the Universal Monsters that inspired his creation, that isn’t really the case here—Swamp Thing comes off less as a tragic hero, despite some dialogue that briefly brings the idea back up, and more as your big green buddy, saving the day while dropping quips. It will even play up romantic moments like a joke, dropping weird ideas without dwelling or expanding on them at all, and flaunts logic in the name of cheap & easy entertainment. Even returning actors from the first film, like Dick Durock as Swamp Thing and Louis Jordan as his nemesis Anton Arcane, seem to be intentionally hamming it up a lot more than the first one. The tone here seems to be more of a PG/PG-13 Troma film, crass comedy for people who want monster yucks with their monster yuck.
The story follows up on its predecessor (which it flashes back to for a brief origin recap) by focusing on Arcane’s step-daughter, Abigail (Heather Locklear, who fully understands what kind of movie she’s in), a hippy-dippy flower shop employee who wishes the men in her life were more like her beloved plants—har har, I wonder where that’s gonna go. She travels to the swamp to confront her distant step-father about the mysterious death of her mother, and Arcane and his giant bayou mansion and mercenary force are all still in action as if the ending of the last movie never happened. You may be wondering how Arcane recovered from turning into a pig-monster and also being dead, and that is perfunctorily answered with the intervention of geneticists Dr. Rochelle (Ace Mask) and Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas, whose previous connection to DC comics movies was playing the villainous Ursa in Superman II), who are now seeking out a way to reverse the aging process, which would also prevent Arcane’s new body from rapidly decomposing. They are doing this by performing human/animal genetics experiments in their basement lab, which will somehow lead to the secret of immortality—one of the half-and-half mutants they create, an excuse for some neatly disgusting make-up effects, escapes into the swamp and attacks the locals. Thankfully, Swamp Thing is still lurking about in the murky waters, rising up when convenient to do battle with the leech-headed monstrosity (vocal effects by the legendary Frank Welker, who also gets to voice a parrot that is also in this movie for some reason) and Arcane’s pack of gun-toting mercenaries, led by the dimwitted Gunn (Joey Sagal) and Miss Poinsettia (Monique Gabrielle.) The Swamp Thing suit in this movie is maybe less rubbery-looking than in the previous movie, covered in a appropriate amount of plant matter and roots and eye-catching shades of green, but it sounds like wearing it was even harder on Durock—although he still ended up reprising the role in the TV series that spun off from this movie, so I guess he adapted.
Abigail gets pulled into Arcane’s devious scheme to use her compatible blood type to grant him his immortality, is saved by Swamp Thing, and almost immediately falls in love with him because, well, they set up that joke at the beginning of the film. Unable to get particularly intimate in ST’s beautiful, artificial-looking homestead, he instead offers a leaf from his body that gives her a high that allows her to have a realistic, imaginary love-making session with a human Alec Holland, one of those bizarre concepts that can’t help but feel intentionally undercut by all the one-liners and goofy moments that surround it (and also some tonal whiplash lines, like Swamp Thing explaining how the swamp is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of unhappy slaves, to which Abigail replies “I don’t know how anyone could be unhappy here!”—read the room, lady.) No matter how Swamp Thing tries to get across the inherent tragedy of his existence, a point that Craven hit on hard in his movie, it is impossible to take anything in this remotely seriously, and that’s entirely by design.
The thing you can’t fault the movie for is its consistency in that tone. It is dopey from beginning to end, dialogue ramped up and ridiculous, every character a cartoon, full of silly of moments (like a chunk of Swamp Thing breaking into Arcane’s plantation manor by oozing through the bathtub in the form of jungle green food colouring), with almost no lulls in the japery—low-energy dead zones being the Achilles Heel of so many cheap, wannabe parodies. There is a pair of child actors, who first appear trying to sneak a peek at a pile of pornography (which we see Dr. Rochelle looking at later in the movie) before being attacked by the leech-man, who overact to a pretty obnoxious degree, but I can’t really fault them for it because, well, have you seen the movie that they’re in? Characters like Gunn are much the same. There’s a very thin line between mildly amusing and aggressively unfunny that Return manages to balance—there’s very little that’s particularly clever, but it never annoyed me. It often feels like its going for the same feel as something like fellow Corman alumni Joe Dante’s Piranha, but doesn’t have that level of sophistication (let alone the sophistication of Dante’s later monster comedy-horrors); it also isn’t as audacious as cartoonish monster movies like Brain Damage. It aims for the low middle and generally hits, which is still better than many others of this vintage.
I don’t want to say that this comes from any sense of contempt for the material or its audience, but maybe a certain level of detachment from it. It has a drive to deliver comedy bits and monster suits, all the things that the movie promises from the top, without the kind of emotional connection that convinces an artist to push the material in stranger and more memorable directions. Those things are executed competently, but there’s a weightlessness to it all—this is especially felt in the action scenes, which have all the feel of a stunt show, offering no tension as Swamp Thing appears without fanfare and dispatches whatever foes are in front of him without much fuss (one time using a baseball bat.) This gets to the point where, after several scenes of Swampy taking out unwary mercs on Arcane’s property, he says “This is too easy”—and that’s before getting into the big climax, where Swamp Thing is confronted by a bulbous-headed mutant, who he effortlessly tosses around like a sack of flour. While the make-up is suitably grotesque, not even these monster-vs.-monster scenes are treated as anything other than a disposable joke, despite clearly being there solely to give the creature feature audience “what it wants.” It’s likely that this sort of shoulder-shrugging, anything-for-a-laugh approach to genre filmmaking might be the attitude one must take in order to direct over 150 movies.
That attitude makes this movie slightly confounding—it’s not trying to be good or witty, and its self-awareness never goes anywhere in particular, yet it still manages to execute on its low ambitions fairly consistently. One of things that makes Swamp Thing such an endearing character is that he’s a low-art concept that seems open to a surprising number of possibilities, something that can be both silly and serious, sometimes at the same time. Many comics creators, and even Wes Craven, saw that contradiction as a challenge to show how they can balance the B-movie aspects with the intriguing tragedy and fantastical ideas—a chance to really showcase why they love both aspects of monster stories. Return, however, tosses that all aside to focus entirely on all the campiness that the name suggests, and as glib as that can come off, at least it has the courage of its non-convictions.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 