13. A Horror Film That Features a Swamp Creature

Larry Buchanan made a number of low-budget 16mm color remakes of American International Pictures movies for television. Despite the limited budget, he was able to create some truly wild films, including this one, which was inspired by Voodoo Woman.

Dr. Simond Trent (Jeff Alexander) has set up shop deep in the Texas swamps — these are a real thing — and has taken the natives — this is not a thing — for experiments, trying to reverse their evolution.

MOASASOURI – A MONSTER FROM ANOTHER AGE…with terrifying, destructive powers…his victims fight for their lives in a silent, eerie underwater battleground!

Sure, whatever you say!

Every time Trent creates a new creature in his glass fog machine, yelling “Live! Breath!” it never makes it. So then he carries it to his swimming pool full of stock footage and feeds it to the gators, as if Porky Wallace did mad science instead of running a redneck bar.

Frenchy (Roger Ready) and Brenda Simmons (Shirley McLine) join oilman Driscoll West’s (Bill Thurman) expedition in the hopes of making some money for doing nothing. She tries to seduce him, but he turns her down, and one of their thugs, Ritchie (Cal Duggan), kills the rich man. So when geologist Barry Rogers (John Agar) arrives to start the exploring, she explains that she’s Driscoll’s wife, and he’s none the wiser.

Thanks to their guide, Rabbit Simms (Charles McLine), they all end up at the suburban house/mad scientist lab of Trent, whose wife, Pat (Francine York), wants to leave, and the men all treat her like they’re John Ashley in a Blood Island movie. Then, Brenda’s plans go awry, and she is transformed into something else. A green creature that doesn’t look real at all, and therefore makes this movie so much better as a result. She instantly launches Trent into his own gators, then dives in herself, escaping a life as a monster instead of, well, being a monster.

I watched this in the middle of the night, and maybe I wasn’t sober at all, which was the ideal way to watch it. You should feel on the verge of passing out and in another state of consciousness before it starts, then let it wash over you. More monster movies should have body paint instead of latex suits or complicated CGI.

Buchanan would take Invasion of the Saucer Men and make The Eye Creatures; Day the World Ended  as In the Year 2889; It Conquered the World as Zontar The Thing from Venus and The She-Creature as Creature of Destruction. Of this movie, he said, “Never make a swamp picture. Your film comes back and it’s all…strange”.

You can watch this on Tubi.