I find it incredibly humorous that after Alan Moore, Stephen Bisette and John Totleben reinvented comic books with Saga of the Swamp Thing, director Jim Wynorski and writers Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris were making this sequel to the original Swamp Thing and went nearly full camp.

After her mother’s mysterious death, Abigail Arcane (Heather Locklear) has come to confront her wicked stepfather Dr. Arcane (the returning Louis Jordan) who has somehow come back from the grave and is working to stop the aging proccess with Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas). Oh yeah, he’s also making an army of monsters.

Luckily, Swamp Thing is around and still played by stuntman Dick Durock, who wore a seventy plus pound suit in the humid swams so we’d have a movie to watch. This being a Wynorski movie, Monique Gabrielle shows up as well.

I love that in the midst of this wackiness — I mean, Swamp Thing drives a jeep at one point sending me into fits of laughter — the movie takes the time to recreate the love scene between its hero and Abby from “Rite of Spring,” which appeared in Swamp Thing #34. In the hands of the comic creative team, it’s poetic, gorgeous and full of deep meanings about man’s spiritual place in nature. In the hands of Wynorski, it’s Heather Locklear eating a cucumber out of a swamp person.

In my youth, I used to look down on the director’s movies as fluff. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate them for their entertainment value and how well made they are. Not everything has to be so deadly droll all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.