ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey. His April Movie Thon list is here.

April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.

“Pleasure, the inevitable byproduct of our civilization. A new world where our only preoccupation will be…how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your times, my young friends, is that you might get exactly what you want.”–some random guy leading The Monkees through some sort of factory. Was this the factory where The Monkees were initially manufactured?

I was a huge fan of The Monkees during their, thanks to MTV rerunning their television show, resurgence in the mid 1980s. I quickly scooped up any cassette tape I could find. On a road trip back to Louisiana from Ohio, I subjected my poor aunt to their debut record on a loop. Looking back, I’m surprised that she didn’t intentionally drive off into a ditch after the seventh time hearing Davy Jones warble I Wanna Be Free.

I did not have any idea that The Monkees were considered a prefabricated cash in on Beatlemania. Even after purchasing a replica magazine originally published in the 1960s, where the group was dubbed The Pre-Fab Four, it never occurred to me that The Monkees could possibly be seen as subpar artists.

My love for The Monkees did not die out when their second wave of fame ended perhaps prematurely after more intra-band disputes (turns out the relationships among the members were often volatile). As a teenager, I was an avid VHS collector. I loved receiving those catalogs in the mail from Movies Unlimited. And it was through one of those catalogs that I discovered The Monkees starred in a major motion picture (co-written by Jack Nicholson no less) entitled Head. The VHS was a striking yellow. The members of The Monkees seemingly suspended in mid-air, with some sort of spiral in the background. I immediately mailed in my order form, anxiously awaiting this tape to be sent to me.

After watching Head, I instantly began gaslighting myself into thinking that the film was good. Great even. Sure, it was different from any other film I had seen up to that point. There was no plot. The songs were not as poppy as I was accustomed to. But this film had to be great, right? I tried to get my friends to watch it and like it. They were less than interested, not making it more than 10 minutes before insisting that I turn it off. Eventually, I began to come to the realization that I was simply fooling myself–Head was a flop.

Fast forward many years. Once I had kids of my own, I did what any good parent does–indoctinate them. Force them to like the things I liked when I was their age (not just The Monkees, but also Family Ties, Masters of the Universe and Jem and the Holograms). It worked! My daughter loved The Monkees as much as I did, only with a major crush on Davy Jones that I never had (I was more of a Peter Tork kind of guy).

And then, the unthinkable happened. Criterion released Head as part of their BBS: America Lost and Found boxset. And if it was worthy of inclusion in The Criterion Collection, surely that meant that the film was indeed the cinematic masterpiece I always deep down inside knew that it was.

After we watched all of the episodes of The Monkees, my daughter and I watched Head. I warned her that it was a bit surreal and did not have much of a plot. She said she enjoyed parts of it, particularly the scene between Davy Jones and Toni Basil, set to Daddy’s Song, an upbeat tune about a deadbeat father. That scene was always a favorite of mine too when I was younger.

But as I watched the film, I was awestruck. Everything was right there in front of me the whole time. Head was The Monkees suicide attempt. A chance to unshackle themselves from their teenage girl fanbase and embrace the counterculture. To be seen as more than four guys brought together by a television producer. They were true artists and musicians. The songs were perhaps the best songs in their entire catalog. But what should have been their opportunity to burst out of the literal and figurative box turned out to be a financial failure. The Beatles could go to India and return changed people, but The Monkees would forever be a band who did not play their own instruments on their records (even though they later did. And nobody seems to care that The Beach Boys (minus Brian Wilson) hardly played instruments on Pet Sounds).

Watching Head today, I realized how much of the film entered my daily vernacular. There are so many lines from the film I say quite often: “That song is pretty white” (Frank Zappa’s retort to Davy Jones after Daddy’s Song), “And the same thing goes for Christmas” (Michael Nesmith’s response after berating surprise birthday parties), “Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor” (Peter’s advice to Davy in the bathroom where Davy is experiencing issues with a psychedelic mirror). 

Am I probably still overrating Head all these years later? Maybe. Am I crazy for preferring this soundtrack album over anything The Beatles produced? Definitely. At any rate, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will remain a joke until The Monkees are inducted. My playlist will remain jam packed with plenty of tunes from The Monkees. And if I ever need to reach for a comfort movie that features the assassination of a Viet Cong officer, I need to long no further.

April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.

The 2007 prequel The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning is a curious artifact of the mid-2000s direct-to-video boom, arriving just two years after the big-budget Johnny Knoxville/Seann William Scott theatrical film. While the 2005 version felt like a glossy Hollywood blockbuster, The Beginning leans hard into the “teen sex comedy” trope that defined the post-American Pie era (which also got its own endless series of direct-to-video sequels).

When mischievous teenage cousins Bo (Jonathan Bennett, Mean Girls and so many holiday movies) and Luke Duke (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment) are put in the care of their Uncle Jesse (Willis Nelson) to work on his farm. But they soon learn that their uncle makes the best moonshine anywhere, and Boss Hogg (Christopher McDonald) plans to close down their family farm. Along with Cooter (Joel David Moore, Norm from the Avatar series) and their cousin Daisy (April Scott), they’ll save the day.

Directed by Robert Berlinger, whose career is mostly in TV, and written by Shane Morris (one of the writers of Frozen), this gets in everyone you want from the series, like Roscoe (Harland Williams), Enos (Adam Shulman), Lulu Hogg (Sherilynn Fenn) and even Gary Cole taking over for Waylon Jennings as the Balladeer. Originally airing on ABC Family, there were also R-rated and unrated versions.

Common Sense Media adds, “Parents need to know that this comedy has all the raunch of the American Pie movies and all the sexism of There’s Something About Mary. It encourages girls to base their worth on how they look and to use their appearance to manipulate men. It may also lead teen boys to drive recklessly. The film also says that General Robert E. Lee, who led the South in the Civil War, was “the greatest general,” which may disturb families of color. The film shows teens drinking and implies that teens have sex.”

Somehow, this has a Drive-By Truckers song on the soundtrack.

Otherwise, this is not my Dukes of Hazzard, which is probably so problematic now I shouldn’t have written that. I didn’t like that Daisy went from a nerd to a woman who learned that only through her beauty could she get what she wanted.

If you expect nothing from a direct-to-video and cable prequel/sequel to a failed reboot, you will be rewarded in abundance.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 13: (Evil) Plant Appreciation Day — It ain’t easy being green. Pay tribute to all the plants with a movie starring one of them.

Also known as Haunted House Elf, this Hong Kong/Taiwan crossover has a rich Hong Kong family move to a new home in Taiwan, where poor kid Wang Chi-Chiang convinces Shiao-Ming (Lin Hsiao Lan) and her brother Shiao Tai that the new place is haunted. He’s not kidding, as Tong-Tong, a jiangshi, is hopping around in the basement, stuck there for three hundred years. Then, as if that’s not enough, Shiao-Ming and Chi-Chiang decide to jump into a comic book and battle jungle monsters — A real tiger! A real swamp! Intelligent vines! — and cannibals to rescue a princess. Then, they battle a witch doctor (Wu Ma!) who can transform into a stone idol that spits out skeletons, a tiger, a rat, a dog, a witch, the Monkey King, Dracula and even Jesus, at which point the kids chase him with a cross, yelling “We’ll crucify him!” in total joy.

No, I did not make that up.

There’s also Tong-Tong’s vampire parents, who somehow have finally found him across decades of time.

Lin Hsiao Lan was in a ton of these films — Kung Fu Wonderchild, Magic of Spell — usually as a little boy. She gets to play a little girl this time, even though she was in her 20s when it was filmed. I’m on the side of Chi-Chiang in this, an impoverished half-orphan stuck with a gentrifying neighborhood and rich kids who have it all instead of what he has, which is a drunk dad. So he does what any of us would: he bullies them with tales of the undead.

A movie that steals the theme from The Shining, most of the third Mr. Vampire movie and so many other films to basically jump all over the place and often forget where it’s going. No notes, 10/10.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 12: 412 Day — A movie about Pittsburgh (if you’re not from here that’s our area code). Or maybe one made here. Heck, just write about Striking Distance if you want.

Isn’t Blood Freak made in Miami?

Yes, but this is Yinzer Blood Freak, made right here in Pittsburgh. Yes, this time, we’ve moved from the balmy Atlantic breeze to the smell of the Mon.

Herschel (Chuck Connors) has just come into town, riding down 279 when he meets Angel (Shana Connors), who lectures to him about Jesus and why the marijuana that everyone loves is so wrong. She brings him home, where he meets her opposite sister Ann (Ashleigh Schimmel), who loves to get baked and is a bad, bad girl. The kind that lures dumb biker men away from good women and the Good News. But Herschel stays strong and resists the lure of jailbait, which only makes Ann so upset that she gets him hooked on ganja. 

We get this narrated to us by Tim Gross, the man who brings us Grossfest every year, telling us about God, drugs and so much more.

One toke across the line from Ann, however, and Herschel is dancing horizontally with her. Her dad busts in, and he doesn’t kill this biker in bed with his underage daughter. As long as he’s a Christian, he’s OK and can even work at the Light of God Turkey Farm and Science Farm. That leads him to eat radioactive turkey and become a were-turkey, just as in the original. 

Directed by Daniel Boyd and Gross, written by Boyd and made all over Allegheny County, this makes me happy that it’s so good. Unlike the original, this is no dream. Nor is it played as seriously as that movie. 

You can watch this on Vimeo.

April 11:Heavy Metal Movies — Pick a movie from Mike McPadden’s great book. RIP. List here.

The year was 1992. Kevin Eastman, who, along with Peter Laird, helped turn four turtles and some ooze into a global empire, decided he needed a new sandbox. And not just any sandbox, but the glossy, psychedelic and often scantily-clad pages of Heavy Metal. He may have grown up on a steady diet of Jack Kirby, but it was the French import Métal Hurlant that really blew his mind. The Richard Corben art looked like it was airbrushed in another dimension, plus it was European, it was cool, and it was for grown-ups.

When the magazine went up for sale, Eastman saw it as the final piece of the puzzle. He’d started Tundra Publishing to make comics for adults, and Heavy Metal was already sitting on newsstands across the country, waiting for those same readers. It was a match made in a weird, sci-fi heaven. His plan? Use the mag to bridge the gap between comic shops and the mainstream newsstands. He wanted to serialize high-end European hardcovers and bring them to the masses. 

While he eventually sold the brand, he did a lot with it, including this film, which was based on his comic The Melting Pot, which he created with Simon Bisley and Eric Talbot. In November of 2007, a new 170-page version of the story was published as a special edition of Heavy Metal, which was the springboard for this series.

Even better, not only was Eastman living a comic book lover’s dream life, but he was also married to Julie Strain, the B-movie queen and Penthouse Pet of the Year, who ended up being the animated star (and literal body model) of this movie.

The Arakacians once ruled the galaxy thanks to a rift where space and time itself leaked. They used this fluid to become immortal rulers of everything, until they were defeated. The key to this well of sorts is a green crystal (Is it the Loc-Nar? Maybe…), but anyone who finds the fountain goes absolutely out of their head.

Tyler (Michael Ironside) is a miner who touches the key and unlocks knowledge of how to get to the elixir by killing the Edenites of F.A.K.K.² (Federation-Assigned Ketogenic Killzone), a world where those touched by the fluids live. He destroys most of the world and takes a teacher, Kerrie, to be his slave, which sends her sister Julie (Julie Strain) on a blood-soaked quest for revenge.

This isn’t the original 1981 Heavy Metal, which is a movie I can watch at any and every time, but it tries its damnedest. It even has a ritual in which Julie bathes, just like Taarna, serving as a direct visual bridge to the segment we all remember from the first film.

And hey, if the plot doesn’t grab you, the audio will. Billy Idol shows up as a mysterious character named Odin, and the soundtrack is a time capsule of turn-of-the-millennium industrial and hard rock, featuring voices and tracks from Sascha Konietzko and Tim Skold of KMFDM, as well as Monster Magnet, Pantera and System of a Down.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 10: Seagal vs. Von Sydow — One is a laughable martial artist. The other is a beloved acting legend. You choose whose movie you watch; it’s both of their birthdays.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey. His April Movie Thon list is here.

I’ve seen so many rip-offs of The Exorcist over the years (or, if I want to be nicer, I will refer to these films as cash grabs): Abby, The Antichrist, Magdalena Possessed by the Devil, The Return of the Exorcist, Beyond the Door. The list goes on and on. And it is definitely one of my favorite sub-subgenres of exploitation films.

I had never seen Exorcist II: The Heretic before. I heard it was not good. Why should I let the opinions of others stop me? I do believe that films come to me at the correct time. While there may never be a time where I think it is a masterpiece, Exorcist II is so weird that I have to respect it. It may be the closest a mainstream American film ever got to emulating an Italian horror film. 

The idea of using a sequel to capitalize on the success of an earlier film was nothing new of course. Sequels had been around for a while in one shape or form, really taking off in the 1970s. We covered the “get me another” trend earlier this month. But Hollywood does not necessarily buy into the “success breeds success” mantra. It is more like, “let’s see how little money we can put into a second film and maximize the profits on name recognition alone”. 

Almost no one involved in The Exorcist wanted anything to do with the sequel. Lawsuits had already been filed over credits and profits. The producers of the sequel wanted to spend about $3 million dollars on the film (it ended up closer to $14 million, more than the budget of the original film). Linda Blair is back (although she was not down for getting that make up done again–a double was used). As is the prolific Max von Sydow as Father Merrin, in an even more diminished role. Richard Burton dons the cassock as a priest struggling with his faith. And Louise Fletcher, fresh off of her Academy Award win for Best Actress, plays a doctor with some peculiar methods.

Nothing makes sense in Exorcist II. But that aspect is what kind of makes the film great. Great is a strong word. Memorable? Pseudo-science abounds as Fletcher’s character Dr. Gene Tuskin uses some sort of flashing light, high to low tones, and brain wave measurements to “synchronize” with Regan. When Burton’s priest character Father Lamont connects with Regan, he finds the demon Pazuzu still within her. From there, we are treated to a whole lot of nonsense, including but not limited to James Earl Jones dressed up like a locust, Father Merrin’s African adventures, and a return to the MacNeil residence in Georgetown.

I was so taken back by what transpires that I almost feel like I need to watch the film again immediately with a different perspective. I can only imagine what audiences were thinking when they left the theater in 1977 after watching this one. Well, I’m sure they were thinking it was utter garbage. I’m trying to think of a modern comparison for such a change in tone from a blockbuster film and its sequel. The only one that comes to mind is The Blair Witch Project and Book of Shadows: Blair Witch II.

If nothing else, Exorcist II tries something rather than simply retreading the original story. Something films of today could attempt. I’m looking at you, Scream 7. 

April 10: Seagal vs. Von Sydow — One is a laughable martial artist. The other is a beloved acting legend. You choose whose movie you watch; it’s both of their birthdays.

“That’s for my wife. Fuck you and die!”

Steve Seagal movies are not subtle.

They are blunt-force trauma wrapped in a silk kimono and topped with a ponytail that defies the laws of physics.

LAPD Detective Mason Storm (Seagal) got too close to the truth. The wrong shady politician got tipped off, and some dirty cops blew their way into his house, killing his wife and putting him in a coma for seven years. During that time, he’s cared for only by Andy Stewart (Kelly LeBrock), a nurse who apparently thinks the best way to revive a comatose patient is to let kittens walk all over him. Keep in mind that at this point in the movie, Seagal looks like White Jesus and is super sweaty. 

Lt. O’Malley (Frederick Coffin) is the real MVP here, keeping Storm hidden and legally dead” while he rots in a hospital bed. When Storm finally wakes up—recovering through acupuncture (this is during the Japanese phase of Seagal and shoutout to Bad Movie Bible for pointing this out), herbs, and sheer ego — O’Malley is there to reveal he’s been raising Storm’s son this whole time. Is O’Malley going to die just to provide more revenge grist for the mill? You know it. No one survives being Steven Seagal’s best friend.

The final boss is Senator Vernon Trent (William Sadler), who ends the movie with a shotgun in his mouth before it is directed at his groin. This comes after Seagal spends ninety minutes barely selling for anyone. Even after being riddled with bullets earlier in the film, Mason Storm treats a coma like a minor case of the Mondays.

Seagal did not get along with director Bruce Malmuth (the ring announcer for The Karate Kid and the director of Nighthawks), saying, “I think it’s a miracle that this guy can put one foot in front of the other.” Whatever happened to Malmuth’s cut of the film, Warner Bros. demanded the movie be heavily cut and re-edited to a 90-minute running time to maximize how many times a day it could play. There’s a legend that an alternate ending was also filmed, in which Storm kills Trent and says, “Take that to the bank.” He also supposedly set the big bad on fire inside a fireplace.

More potential IMDbs: “When it came time to film this scene, Seagal, director Bruce Malmuth and several of the producers got into a spat, leading to Seagal storming off set and into his trailer, upset. It was William Sadler himself who suggested Storm shoot at his groin and miss, making an insulting comment about his small genitalia. The producers liked the idea and sent Sadler to Seagal’s trailer to pitch it, feeling that he would not have listened to them if they had brought it to his attention. Seagal liked Sadler’s idea, returned to the set, and they filmed this ending instead in just a few hours, putting the matter to rest.”

This movie’s original title was Seven Year Storm. Warner Bros. changed it. But Seagal gets marketing. His line “I’m gonna take you to the bank, Senator Trent… the blood bank,” wasn’t even in the original script. It was all ad-lib and ended up in the trailer.

I would put this on the “good” side of the Seagal equation. There’s a lot of him cracking bones and cracking jokes, usually at the same time. It also reminds you that at one point, Seagal was married to LeBrock and for that, we should respect him. A little, I guess.

It also follows the Cobra playbook of going totally overboard in a convenience store. That’s how you do an action movie: put the hero in a situation we’ve all been in, let him decimate some jobbers, and never — ever — let him show weakness. Seagal lives up to the title; he doesn’t just survive a coma, he treats it like when you wake up with your arm still asleep.

Hard to Kill was remade twice in Turkey as Cheetah Ram and Shastra.

April 9: Do You Like Hitchcock? — Write about one of his movies.

After Torn Curtain and Topaz were failures, Alfred Hitchcock went back to murder. After those two espionage films, this was an actual Hitchcock film, one in which former RAF squadron leader Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a man with a history of angry bursts of violence, becomes the prime suspect in the Necktie Murders, which have actually — way too early spoiler — been committed by his friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). 

Yet this is a film of firsts. It’s the only Hitchcock film to receive an R rating in the U.S. during its initial release, and it would be the first time nudity appeared in one of his movies. Those scenes, which are also filled with detailed murders, were so harsh that actresses Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey refused to be in them. Body doubles did the job instead.

Hitchcock, ever the technician, used a Linhof Technika camera for many of the film’s ultra-tight close-ups, capturing the grit of early 70s London. He also returned to his roots, filming on location at Covent Garden, where his father had been a vegetable merchant. You can almost smell the rotting produce and the stale ale.

The first victim we meet is Brenda Blaney (Leigh-Hunt), Richard’s ex-wife, who runs a dating service. They’ve already turned down Rusk, as he’s a pervert, so when he comes back, he quickly assaults and strangles her. Her secretary comes back from lunch, just in time to see Richard wandering around, trying to get in. When the body is found, he’s now a suspect. He hides with a former co-worker, Babs Milligan (Massey); they have sex, and hours later, she runs into Rusk, who kills her as well.

In a time before DNA evidence, Richard is totally screwed. He even goes to prison for the crime and escapes, only to make his way back to Rusk’s flat to find another dead body in the bed. Luckily, Rusk comes back to the scene of the crime just in time to be caught by Inspector Timothy Oxford (Alec McCowan).

One of the film’s most famous sequences involves Rusk trying to retrieve a monogrammed tie pin from the rigor-mortis-clutched hand of a corpse hidden in a potato truck. It took three days to film that scene, and Foster (Rusk) actually had to endure being covered in real potato dust, which is apparently quite the skin irritant.

Michael Caine was Hitchcock’s first choice for the role of Rusk, but said, “He offered me the part of a sadist who murdered women, and I won’t play that. I have a sort of moral thing, and I refused to play it, and he never spoke to me again.” This does not explain why he plays a woman killer in Dressed to Kill. Spoilers again, huh?

In the article “Frenzy at 50: The most violent film Hitchcock ever made,” Mark Allison writes, “On the surface, this project bore everything that audiences could expect from the ageing auteur – a murdered blonde and an innocent man clearing his name, served with lashings of suspense – but with the greater permissiveness of early 1970s cinema came a much nastier tone than Hitchcock had ever attempted before. Without fear of censorship and facing competition from a new wave of exploitation cinema, from U.S. splatter horror to the Italian giallo, Hitchcock unleashed all his voyeuristic impulses on this shockingly brutal film. The result is, perhaps, just the sort of horribly graphic murder story that he’d always wanted to make, if only he’d been allowed.”

Speaking of gialli, Dario Argento was proclaimed the man who “out Psycho-ed Psycho,” if we are to believe the newspaper ads for The Cat o’Nine Tails.

Yet here’s Hitchcock making a giallo, a film about a strangler who uses neckties, just like a movie that would follow the very next year, Torso. For me, it’s nowhere near the excesses of the Italian psychosexual killer genre, even if Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia thought it was so disturbing that she wouldn’t allow her children to watch it.

Roger Ebert said, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer films have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The only 1970s details are the violence and the nudity (both approached with a certain grisly abandon that has us imagining Psycho without the shower curtain). It’s almost as if Hitchcock, at seventy-three, was consciously attempting to do once again what he did better than anyone else.”

April 8: Zoo Lover’s Day — You know what that means. Animal attack films!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey. His April Movie Thon list is here.

Louisiana has many problems, one of which is an invasive species of rat called nutria. These pests are indigenous to South America, but ended up in Louisiana in the 1930s in an attempt to cultivate a fur industry. It did not result in a profitable, lucrative market, and many of the creatures were released into the wild (along with a hurricane in the 1940s that provided an escape for the nutria). Turns out that the climate and environment of South Louisiana was ideal for the proliferation of the animal, and they began to destroy the wetlands and the overall ecosystem of the area.

As a native of Louisiana, I can tell you that there is always a solution to any vermin problem–if you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em! And that’s just what New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme attempted to do in the 1990s. He had already basically decimated the redfish population in Louisiana’s waters by serving it blackened with a ramekin of butter on the side. Perhaps he could rebrand nutria into the next local delicasse. Slip it into a gumbo. An ètouffèe. Simply batter it and fry it. Heck, put it in the school lunches. It tastes like chicken, right? In this case, rabbit or turkey.

Turns out even people from Louisiana will not eat just anything. Or at least not pay top dollar for it in a fancy restaurant. Cajuns in South Louisiana, as put on display in the regional eco-thriller Terror in the Swamp, would have no issues catching anything that moves and finding a use for all of the animal’s parts. As two characters joke in the film, “How many Cajuns does it take to catch a possum? Two. One to catch it, and one to watch for cars”. Poor Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. Will they never learn?

In Terror in the Swamp, the thought of nutria as a food source does not really play a role in the plot. Instead, it is all about the fur. Some biologists have released something that has mutated a nutria into a Bigfoot-type monster stalking the bayou. Once a reward for the beast is posted, every redneck in the parish is ready with their shotgun and their boat. Just be sure to have the proper hunting license so you do not get into trouble with the game warden.

Unfortunately, Terror in the Swamp is not as exciting as I had hoped. Directed by Joe Catalanotto, the influence that Charles B. Pierce had on him is very evident. While Catalanotto worked on The Town That Dreaded Sundown, it is Pierce’s The Legend of Boggy Creek and springs to mind every time you see a man in a hairy suit traipsing about the Louisiana bayou. Couldn’t we have at least gotten a close up of those carrot-orange teeth nutria have?

Even as a defender of Louisiana regional horror, I cannot get too excited to recommend Terror in the Swamp to anyone. Unless you are from Louisiana I guess. It’s always nice to have some sort of representation on screen. To those who are starving, even the bitter tastes sweet. Speaking of starving, I could go for a little something. I wonder how nutria would taste in a jambalaya? Probably pretty good as long as you season it properly.