'Swamp Thing' 4K UHD Blu

This release represents a considerable A/V upgrade over Shout! Factory’s 2013 Blu-ray.

Veering sharply away from the visceral horror that put him on the map, Wes Craven followed up the game-changing The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with the one-two punch of the silly, surreal Deadly Blessing and the comic-book adaptation Swamp Thing. An enjoyable enough romp if taken as an amiably lunk-headed action flick, Swamp Thing starts off with an effectively mounted first act that soon gives way to a lot of splashing around in the swamps, punctuated with some incongruously poetic (and oddly endearing) Beauty and the Beast-type moments, and liberally peppered with all the airboat crashes and cigar-chomping David Hess close-ups you could ever want. Add to that running tally Adrienne Barbeau doffing her wardrobe for some tastefully lensed skinny-dipping and an ultra-suave, Nietzsche-spouting turn from Louis Jourdan as villainous Dr. Anton Arcane and it all adds up to a surefire cult film in the making.

Swamp Thing’s first act hews pretty closely to the character’s comic-book origins. The arrival of newbie assistant Abby Cable (Barbeau) at the remote bayou-based laboratory of Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise) sets the stage for a lot of technobabble about recombinant DNA (complete with an Erlenmeyer flask’s worth of glowing green goo a la Re-Animator) as well as a budding romance between the two. Complicating matters is the presence of Dr. Linda Holland (Nannette Brown), whom Abby assumes to be Alec’s wife. A particularly strange moment arrives out of leftfield when he deliberately fails to correct her on the matter. (What sort of psychosexual subtext should we read into that?) And then all that incipient melodrama is rendered moot by a raid on the compound spearheaded by Dr. Arcane that leaves Linda dead, Alec presumably deceased after a fiery run into the swamp waters, and Abby bayou-bound on the run.

Holland, of course, is reborn as Swamp Thing (Dick Durock in a suit whose progressively tattered condition isn’t served particularly well by the transfer’s high-definition treatment). Abby encounters a young black kid named Jude (Reggie Batts), a character who possesses no apparent function other than as a surrogate for the youth-audience demographic. No backstory’s necessary for Jude; he simply appears out of thin air. He does, however, get to deliver one of the film’s best lines. Upon regaining consciousness after being saved from the clutches of some of Arcane’s thugs by Swamp Thing, he murmurs incredulously, “Oh shit, there goes the neighborhood!” Arcane’s henchmen, led by Ferret (Hess) and Bruno (Nicholas Worth), thereupon give chase. This accounts more or less for the second act.

The decidedly anticlimactic battle between Swampy and whatever abomination Arcane has morphed into is badly staged and limply edited, and their water-logged warfare resembles nothing so much as the world’s least erotic bout of mud wrestling. Blame the third act’s overall fecklessness on time- and moneysaving cuts imposed by mercenary completion bondsmen—at least that’s how Craven tells it on his commentary track included on this release.

It remains to be seen whether his proposed Big Finish, an underwater chase through a labyrinthine network of caves and tunnels, would’ve accomplished anything more than upping the film’s admittedly modest “Awesome!” quotient. What we’re left with is a strictly conventional resolution right down to the hero sloshing off alone across the swampy wastes toward the far horizon. That kind of blandly routine denouement always puts me in mind of the line from Barton Fink: “We’ll be hearing from that kid, and I don’t mean a postcard.”

MVD Entertainment Group’s Dolby Vision-boosted UHD is sourced from a new 4K restoration of the film that’s a clear upgrade over Shout! Factory’s 2013 Blu-ray. The gauzy quality of that disc’s transfer could mostly be attributed to the film’s cinematography and is still present here, but across the board there’s a consistent boost in detail and color depth, particularly in the range of greens of the on-location vegetation. If anything, textures are almost too sharp, chiefly when it comes to the Swamp Thing’s rubber suit and how some shots now blatantly expose the seams of the costume’s overlapping pieces. Nonetheless, film grain is healthy throughout, and the transfer shows no signs of any aggressive digital scrubbing. The lossless mono track is indistinguishable from the one on the previous Blu-ray, and it ably distributes the ambient sound effects of swamp life amid the swells of Harry Manfredini’s score with clarity.

MVD’s release comes loaded with all of the features that Shout! Factory included on its earlier Blu-ray, starting with the two commentary tracks. The first features writer-director West Craven in conversation with horror enthusiast Sean Clark. Craven is always an entertaining raconteur, recalling with more humor than malice the effects that his frequent battles with completion bondsmen over the production schedule had on the overall shape and content of the film. And the second track finds makeup and effects man William Munn discussing his life’s work, as well as his involvement with Swamp Thing. This track is prone to more frequent moments of dead air than Craven’s, but Munn does delve into lots of specific detail about his work on the project.

Three short on-screen interviews allow for some low-key and affectionate reminiscences. Adrienne Barbeau discusses her association with horror movies despite her general disregard for them, details the tribulations involved with filming conditions, and declares her general aversion to watching herself on screen. Local boy Reggie Batts talks about the audition process, his interactions with cast and crew, and also touches on his subsequent life experiences. Finally, Swamp Thing creator Len Wein, who passed away in 2017, discusses his early aspirations to be an artist and how he ended up a comic book writer, talks about his visit to the film’s set, and espouses his philosophy of comic-book adaptations in general.

MVD brings Wes Craven’s hokey creature feature to ultra-hi-def with a considerable A/V upgrade over Shout! Factory’s 2013 Blu-ray.

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