Swamp Thing is certainly a B movie, made before Wes Craven become WES CRAVEN with A Nightmare on Elm Street two years later. (He'd already directed The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, but I think of those as a bit less mainstream.) Then again, the fact that it was designed as a B movie, an intentional callback to the creature features of the 1950s (specifically Creature From the Black Lagoon), excuses some of that, making it a feature not a bug.
While generally enjoying the proceedings, I had one big nitpick in the script that I am writing about today.
The idea of alligators is present in Swamp Thing right from the very start. When a new crew is flying in by helicopter to the scientific laboratory in and around which this film is set, two of the men are talking and one of them asks what the primary feeding location is for the alligators in the swamp. The other responds, and I'm paraphrasing, "Right where we land, if they're hungry enough."
Not long later, we learn that the man that Adrienne Barbeau's character is replacing had to leave because he was bitten by an alligator. Although he did not die, he had to be immediately rushed to a hospital and of course was not keen on returning.
Guess how many alligators we see in Swamp Thing?
Zero.
It seems a direct violation of the "Chekhov's gun" principle of dramaturgy. You're surely familiar with this, but in case you aren't, it's a theory put forth by playwright Anton Chekhov, which can be summarized as follows: generally, any narrative element introduced in a script (or a play, in his case) must pay dividends later on in the story, and specifically, if you introduce a gun at the start of the story, it must go off by the end.
Craven's script places unusual emphasis on the presence of alligators in this swamp, going so far as to mention them at least twice. Once would have been enough to require the appearance of an alligator later in the story.
And yet despite the numerous times we see characters thrashing around in these waters, either by themselves or fighting with an adversary, there is never once an alligator that pops its head above the surface. It easily could have dispatched one of the henchmen, to confirm the threat level discussed several times in the film's first ten minutes, or better yet, it could have presented a danger for Barbeau's character as she bathes nude in the swamp, another moment of mortal peril from which the title character can save her.
And yet it does none of these things.
The thing I thought was especially curious was that characters walk in these swamps without even appearing worried that an alligator might swim up on them unnoticed and go into the death roll that they use to kill their prey. Even if no gator actually pops up, this means Craven also forgot that he'd even suggested the characters might have reason to fear them.
I had an especially acute perspective on this from my time spent in and around the billabongs of the Northern Territory earlier last year, on our family trip. Crocodiles were a surefire danger and you didn't even go close to the edge of the water for fear of them. If you should happen to fall out of a boat, you might immediately be in such a panic as to draw extreme attention to yourself and inhibit your own ability to climb back in. And when I used the preposition "in" at the start of this paragraph to describe my relationship to the billabong, we were only "in" a watering hole where it was known safe to swim because it was disconnected from any access points for the crocodiles.
So to watch a whole movie where people blithely discount the threat of alligators -- even after the movie itself has warned us about them -- seemed like the height of falsity.
It made me wonder if it's so much of a B movie that they didn't even have the money for a few alligators and the specialists they'd have to pay to wrangle them. Judging from the rubber suit worn by the main character, that could be the case.
However, I did find charm in that rubber suit, as I did in the movie on the whole. It's not, like, a "good" movie, but it did pass easily enough, to say nothing of reminding me of days in the mid-1980s watching cable ... which is a good outcome for any movie.
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