Plot:
To avoid being caught by the Health Board, a doctor has the corpses he was using for test subjects, dumped out in the local swamp. The dead come back to life and are soon eating anybody who is caught in the swamps. It's up to a Park ranger, a hermit and a bikini-clad blonde, to stop the outbreak and catch who ever is behind this mess.
Our thoughts:
You know it's pretty bad when you can already predict the quality you're going to get from a movie, by the company that releases it without even knowing anything about the movie itself. This was the case of "Swamp Zombies", released by Brain Damage, I already knew it wasn't going to be a good simply because Brain Damage never releases anything good. I'm willing to give any ultra-low budget horror movie a chance, but there becomes a point where its just too much.
The idea behind "Swamp Zombies" isn't a bad one. A doctor trying to create a drug to bring the dead back to life, then to avoid being caught, dumps the test subjects out in the local swamp. Only to have the dead test subjects revive, and cause total mayhem... Maybe not the greatest plot in the world, or the most original, but at least its something. The only problem is, with a story like that you need to have the ability to pull it off, especially when you are going to make it with serious intentions, which is where "Swamp Zombies" ultimately fails.
What stuck out like a sore thumb amongst all the things that are wrong with this movie, was the acting. Of course I'm not naive enough to expect good acting from a project like this, but the fact remains the movie tries to be a serious horror effort. In which to accomplish that you need people who can, kinda actually act, and not hire your friends to play the roles. About the only one who could be considered a professional was Jasmine St. Claire, and well, quite frankly she doesn't get work based on her acting talent. Though she really is the best one out of the entire cast. Even the people who are the zombies couldn't even act worth a damn. Is it really that hard to portray a corpse? If so, why not just watch some George A. Romero flicks for awhile and just imitate those zombies? Here, I don't know what they were trying to do, I guess they believed holding your arms out and walk slowly, constituted a zombie. Well, they only walked slowly part of the time, other times they ran and fought with weapons... Weapons.... I need to stop lying to myself, they used sticks. I'll say that again, they used sticks as weapons. Anyways, yes, we've got the slow going zombies, mixed in with ones that run, fight and use weapons. Why? I don't know. I guess the people behind the camera didn't know either as it was never explained, it just happened at random.
Which seemed to be how the movie was made and put together. As if they just shot whatever they could on that day, on the fly, and try to put it together to make sense in post production. The only problem with that is it caused the story to have erratic flow to it, kind of like sitting in a traffic jam. You're going, you're going and then stop and wait until it gets going again. Not to mention the plot points in the story make little sense to begin with. For example, does a high school science class really have to spend two days and one night out in the swamps, just to collect samples of the nasty water? I've done trips like that, and I'm sure anyone reading this have as well, and no it doesn't take that long. It barely takes up the regular running time of the class, so no, you don't do something like that to the story. You can have the class show up on the day the zombies run amuck and get attacked. Not only will it work just as good, but it'll make it a little less obvious that you are just setting up people to be killed. I'm just scratching the surface here, there are the stories of the mountain man who lost his family, the park rangers, the FBI and the governments involvement with the experiments... Along with several other smaller story-lines and plot points, but I don't feel like going over them. Since they are all given there own special attention in the movie, even though they either didn't relate to the main story-line, or was just so poorly done you'll be saying, "What?"
If I were to give "Swamp Zombies" any compliment it would be the decent enough zombie make-up, when it was actually on there. (Are you telling me no one saw a problem with a person having a white face but normal colored arms?) It wasn't anything grand, but it was nicely done for the most part. Some looked better than others. There could have been something else that might have been worth while but I don't know, after about 40 or so minutes, I started trying to suffocate myself with a couch cushion. To be serious here for a minute though, it took me five different sittings to get all the way through the movie. I don't like being this mean to someone's work but I can't help it, the movie lacks the charm that makes most bad movies entertaining, and "Swamp Zombies" is really that bad. |
