Swamp Thing 1982 is okay, sort of

Not exactly great, not exactly awful.

Said up front, I know absolutely nothing about the original Swamp Thing from DC Comics in the 1970s. All I know is the movie. Just want to point that out.

I found out above this movie because I was looking up info on actress Adrienne Barbeau, saw that she was the lead in Swamp Thing from 1982 and said yeah, I'll watch this.

Can you believe this is a Wes Craven film, the same guy that wrote and directed A Nightmare on Elm Street released two years later? Yep, same dude.

That being said, this isn't a horror film. This is a monster movie with action-adventure in it. Sort of. I honestly really don't know how to classify it.

I really like the overall look of this movie. Color, shot composition and overall cinematography is great. The pacing is actually decent too.

Concerning the story, it's really simple, but I liked the fact that at no point did I have to guess what was going on. Swamp Thing is not one of those movies you have to watch 5 times just to figure out what actually happened. You get it all on the first watch, and that's good. I know who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what everybody's intentions are, and understood the story of the movie clearly. No problems there.

However, there's one thing that such a sore thumb.

This character:

I'm not going to say who/what it is in case you've not seen the movie. But when I saw this, ick... major cringe going on. This is when I thought, "I'm watching a movie and that's a guy in a terrible costume." Yeah. That character, more than anything else, is what breaks Swamp Thing.

The swamp creature itself? Decent. Yeah, it's a guy in a suit, but done so in a way where it didn't bother me. But that wolf-whatever thing? Awful.

Did the wolf-whatever thing completely ruin the movie? Almost. What saved it is that the movie has a bit of heart to it. The story actually saved it. The scenes where Adrienne Barbeau and the swamp creature get to know each other, and the great bad guy characters (the human ones, that is) is what kept this movie from being a total train wreck.

So, again, not exactly great, not exactly awful.

On an end note, I'm surprised I didn't see this as a kid. Not in the theaters but as a home movie rental. Nobody ever talked about this movie and I wonder why, because I had friends who were into comics. Maybe they just weren't into Swamp Thing? Who knows.

Published 2022 Mar 1