By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Doctor creates genetic mutations.
Dr. Anton Arcane (Louis Jourdan) continues in his quest to fight aging by doing, with the help of his assistant Lana (Sarah Douglas) many experiments that combines genes from swamp creatures and people that creates many monstrous mutations, some of whom escape the lab and go out and terrorize the swamp lands including any human victims that they may come upon. Abby (Heather Locklear) travels to visit Arcane, her stepfather, at his lab to find out what really happened to her dead mother. Arcane uses this as an opportunity to have Abby be his next victim to his newest experiment where he hopes to transfer her youthful essence to his body, so he can be young again, but Swamp Thing (Dick Durock) returns to fight off Arcane and all of his henchmen in order to save Abby and the two fall in love in the process.
This ill-advised sequel could of been so much better had, or at least had some potential, had it been put in the hands of a talented director, but instead the project was handed over to Jim Wynorski, who’s pretty much the Ed Wood of his era. He not surprisingly flunked out of film school back in the 70’s, but was so desperate to get into the business that he traveled out to Hollywood anyways and managed to get a job as an on-location manager to the short lived TV-show ‘Breaking Away’, but soon got fired from that and feeling demoralized and out of money he humbly took the next flight home thinking that was the end of his Hollywood dreams, and most likely it would’ve been, had he not met someone on the airplane who knew Roger Corman and he set-up a meeting with him, which got him a job writing screenplays for his production company that ultimately lead to him directing. To date he’s helmed over 110 movies, but virtually all of them have been critically panned and many are of the direct-to-video variety making you wonder if it’s really worth making all those movies if nobody ever sees them.
This film is typically of his campy approach where everything is done for cheap laughs, which quickly become tiresome. I don’t mind some humor in horror films and during the 80’s it became common for killers to make jokey one-liners after they killed their victims, which became kind of kitschy, but those at least had some bona fide scares and gore. This one though has no fright or tension and just the tackiest of effects making it all just a cheap, silly mess.
Locklear is certainly easy on the eyes, but her character is written in a way that makes her seem like it’s just some sort of walk-on role where she steps in to make a few snarky comments and then leaves. She seems to have no emotional connection to anything going on around her and she has no discernable arc making her presence overall quite sterile. She also rushes to judgement about things and lets her motivations be known too quickly. For instance, when she first arrives at Arcane’s residence she immediately gets into a bickering match with Lana, but wouldn’t it make more sense since she’s just gotten there to hide her animosity until she’s figured out how to maneuver her way around and see whom she can trust? She also instantaneously falls for Swamp Thing, but it would’ve been more interesting transition had she been reserved around him, or even disgusted by his appearance, as most people probably would be.
Jourdan, in his second to last film, is fun though looking frailer than he did in the same role eight years earlier. However, in the last outing it ended with him turned into a monster and no explanation for how he was able to turn back into his original form, which makes this seem less like a sequel and more like a separate movie altogether.
The only one that I really did like was Daniel Emery Taylor who plays this fat redhead kid that says a lot of amusing lines. His acting his actually terrible, but it jives with his goofy, clumsy character and thus becomes amusing. In fact, I think had he and his friend Oman, played by RonReaco Lee, been the sole protagonists this thing could’ve done a lot better. I also felt that turning it into a live action was a mistake as the comic book visuals that get shown over the opening credits look rather cool making me believe the entire thing should’ve been animated.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: May 12, 1989
Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Director: Jim Wynorski
Studio: Millimeter Films
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, PlutoTV, Tubi
Scopophilia 