The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) / Comedy-Horror
MPAA Rated: PG-13 for sensuality, mild gore, violence, and some language
Running Time: 88 min.Cast: Heather Locklear, Louis Jourdan, Dick Durock, Sarah Douglas, Joey Sagal, Ace Mask, Monique Gabrielle, RonReaco Lee, Daniel Emery Taylor
Director: Jim Wynorski
Screenplay: Neil Cuthbert, Grant Morris
Review published June 28, 2018
Heather Locklear (Firestarter, Uptown Girls) stars as Abigail, a horticulturalist who travels to see her stepfather in order to get more information as to what happened to her deceased mother, whose remains disappeared under mysterious circumstances. That stepfather just so happens to be Dr. Arcane (Jourdan, Octopussy), apparently having survived his ordeal against the Swamp Thing in the 1982 film. Arcane doesn't mind inviting her into his home to investigate, even if he's employing some Dr. Moreau-like experiments to genetically merge human beings with various animals, as he has his own evil plans to use her in order to maintain his own life indefinitely. However, the Swamp Thing once again played by Dick Durock (though his voice is dubbed over by an uncredited voice actor), takes an immediate role as her savior time and again, battling local creeps and the occasional Arcane experiment terrorizing the habitat (this one shot near Savannah, Georgia), eventually culminating in a scenario for another showdown that will result in a battle for survival for beauty, the beast, and the madman.
Released seven years after the low-budget Wes Craven original that found some success on the home video market, the creators, including perennial b-movie director Jim Wynorski (The Lost Empire, Final Voyage) and screenwriters Neil Cuthbert (Mystery Men) and Grant Morris (Shrimp on the Barbie), go full bore into the campy tone that Craven had only offered as the spice to flavor his own effort. In jokes abound, with Locklear's inclusion resulting in a few throwaway lines about Motley Crue and "T.J. Hooker", while Jourdan talks to a parrot named Gigi, in reference to perhaps his most famous of films.
The make-up certainly works better in this follow-up, as Dick Durock is able to move much more rapidly and naturally, and even exhibit much more personality underneath all of the green goop and leafy adornments. The cinematography is crisper, the costume work more assured, the lighting and other effects are more robust, and there's a more polished sheen to the film than Craven was afforded the first time around. There are a few nifty ideas, including Swamp Thing traveling through the water pipe system and reassembling himself when he drains into a bathtub in order to get himself into Arcane's lair. Better that than the toilet, I suppose.
Though Wynorski dabbled with other actresses like Traci Lords (who appeared in his prior film, Not of This Earth) and Tonya Roberts (who would later appear in his 1993 film, Sins of Desire) for the role of Abby, Locklear would provide the requisite eye candy, and would receive a Razzie Award as a reward for her role in the film, though, to be fair, this is not the kind of production that necessitates good thespian-ship, and might actually benefit from it. The low point for the film is the love scene between Abby and Swamp Thing, where he offers her a mind-altering piece of himself for her to ingest, which transforms his image to that of a regular hunky man, as they sensually kiss and caress each other, without anything too explicit shown. It's a film that features a vegetable man and his vegetarian love interest, it's chock full of ham and cheese.
A big problem for the franchise is it comes at the heels of Alan Moore's highly acclaimed run in "The Saga of the Swamp Thing", which gained a following for the character who were clearly not going to dig a further digression into the inanity of a deliberately bad, camp-filled movie along the lines of The Toxic Avenger. Along these lines, it is rather fun to see the over-the-top performances from Durock, Jourdan (who came for the paycheck and did not work well with Wynorski), Sagal, Douglas (who fans of DC Comics adaptations will recall as the evil Kryptonian named Ursa from 1980's Superman II), and the two kids, Lee and Taylor, with the latter stealing all of his scenes primarily due to his endearingly bad acting alone. As with the first film, there is some fun that can be had from the child acting, here portrayed by a couple of young boys who are looking for Swamp Thing in order to sell a picture of him for what they feel will earn them about $10,000. One wishes that we could have gotten a spin-off film featuring the continued adventures of the youngest actors, portraying Darryl and Omar, who exude a certain juvenile charm reminiscent of a "Little Rascals" short.
For as much as the makers of this film felt there would be an audience there that enjoyed the Wes Craven original that found some life on VHS, they certainly didn't come out to see this follow-up in the theater, pulling in less than $200,000 overall at the US box office, far below the reported $7 million production budget. Despite its flaws, which are substantial, there is an energy to the production that makes it easy to watch, particularly for those who enjoy films made for bad action-flick lovers, kicking off with CCR's "Born on the Bayou" credits sequence that plays out over lots of images from the DC comics panels, even though Wynorski's film strays far, far away from the tone of the comics represented within the pages of his title at the time.
Guilty pleasures may abound, but one thing's for certain about the competing "things" in comics: the two Swamp Thing films run circles around the god-awful 2006 film based on Marvel's similarly premised Man-Thing. At least this one's good for an occasional chuckle, both intentional and not.
-- Dick Durock would continue portraying the Swamp Thing in a less campy version on television for the USA Network from 1990-93. There is also an extra scene featuring Darryl and Omar a short way into the end credits.
Qwipster's rating:
©2018 Vince Leo
