In 1989, seven years after the failure of Swamp Thing, eccentric producer Benjamin Melniker got his wish to make a second Swamp Thing movie. As you can tell from the poster, The Return of Swamp Thing decided to take a much more silly tone than the first one. The poster also had the audacity to claim Swamp Thing as "America's favorite super hero" in the same year Tim Burton's Batman was released.
But despite the radical change in tone, this movie does officially count as a sequel. Jim Wynorski is the new director, but the top billed actor is once again Louis Jourdan, who played the villain Antone Arcane in the last movie. And although Arcane was clearly killed in the last movie, the filmmakers decided he was good enough to bring back. Or possibly its because Swamp Thing doesn't have any good villains — I don't know, I haven't read any Swamp Thing. Also returning in this film is Dick Durock as Swamp Thing. But this time, his costume looks a lot better. Even better than it looks in that crappy poster. Other than those two actors, the entire cast has changed, which makes sense because almost everyone died in the last movie except for Swamp Thing's girlfriend, Alice Cable. She isn't mentioned at all here, and Swamp Thing's new romantic interest is Abigail Arcane, Dr. Arcane's stepdaughter, played by Heather Locklear.
The movie starts with a group of federal investigators wading through the swamp. It's initially unclear what they're doing, but I think they were looking for moonshiners. Anyway, this scene was a huge improvement over the first movie already because it takes place at night, and the water is waist-deep instead of knee-deep. Some of these investigators are kinda goofy, but I wouldn't say anything is particularly funny at this point. They start to get lost and separated and one by one come across what appears to be an alligator, but is actually a leach-man monster. It's still obviously a guy in a suit, very reminiscent of Power Rangers, but it looks a lot better than the first movie. And again I think a lot of that has to do with the smart decision to have this take place at night, in deeper water, and with plenty of fog around. I can't imagine that this movie had a bigger budget than the first, but they seemed to use their money better. Well, anyway, Swamp Thing eventually comes forward and saves one of the guys. And Swamp Thing looks great. His first costume was so cheap and terrible. Now, for once, he actually looks like a plant man. He has tons of vines and bushes and things growing on him and a more expressive face. He's also a bit bigger, and actually looks like he could be a hero this time. Last movie tried to be too much like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but this time he's clearly a superhero. And I think that could work. Unfortunately, this movie had to ruin everything by making it a comedy.
After a strong opening scene, we cut to a montage of images from Swamp Thing comic books set to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Born on a Bayou." I like CCR as much as the next guy, but they really have no business being in a scary, dark superhero mystery. The inclusion of the comic book art is also rather perplexing. It's almost like the filmmakers felt obligated to demonstrate that this character existed in another medium. I think it's OK for superhero movies to remind the audience of the original source material, but not so blatantly. In this case, if some kid watching this for the first time was interested in one of those Alan Moore covers and went out and bought the comic, he'd be extremely disappointed with this movie. By directly showing some very serious, interesting, critically-acclaimed work and then making a spoof of it, these filmmakers only set themselves up for failure. Which is exactly what happened. According to Wikipedia, The Return of Swamp Thing made just a little more than $192,000.
Once John Fogerty is done singing, we leave the dark swamps of the South to head to the bright sunshine of Southern California. There we meet Abigail Arcane, a botanist who loves plants more than people. She carries on deep conversations with her plants, revealing that she's lost another boyfriend, and her current psychiatrist says the same thing her previous four said, which is that she won't have any healthy relationships until she resolves her issues with her stepfather. Apparently she blames him for not giving her mother a proper funeral, or if he did, then not inviting Abigail to it. I have no idea how that could possibly happen, but whatever. Anyway, Abigail decides she needs to visit her father in person — this is too important for a phone call. So she hastily leaves, telling her assistant to talk to the plants every day, read the sports section to them — they especially like the Lakers — and always keep the TV on.
We then cut to Dr. Arcane, who is surprisingly still alive and human again. It's also surprising to learn that he once had a wife, since in both these movies, he's constantly surrounded by beautiful women. He's also surrounded by the usual idiotic Rambo-type goons, who he's tasked with finding Swamp Thing. But this time, Arcane also has a couple of actual scientists with him, Dr. Rochelle and Dr. Lana Zurrell, played by Sarah Douglas, who was Ursa in Superman II. Apparently these two doctors found Arcane shortly after his fight with Swamp Thing, and he just happened to still be alive. The doctors saved him and restored his humanity, but his health is rapidly deteriorating, so they are experimenting on other people, trying to find a long-term cure for their boss. We actually get to see a couple of their monstrous experiments, including a grotesque half-man, half-elephant thing. The first movie definitely suffered from a lack of monsters, and this movie has a lot more, which is great. Unfortunately, only the leech monster got to go out and fight people, while the rest of the monsters just sat around in cages.
This is where things start to get messy from a story-telling point. We just cut around from scene to scene in mid-conversation. I was surprised to see some people start talking, then be shown someone else halfway across the country, then suddenly return to those same people still talking about the same thing. I guess this is what you call poor film editing. All I know is this is a poorly made film — worse than the first one in certain technical aspects. I wish we could combine the best parts of both the movies and end up with a half-decent Swamp Thing flick.
Well anyway, Abby arrives at Arcane's house, and he is excited to see her because there's a chance her blood could contain the same genetic properties that her mom's did that restored Arcane. But first he needs to test her blood, which requires him coming up with an overly complex plan to acquire some of her blood. He graciously welcomes his stepdaughter into his home, then immediately sends her upstairs to change for dinner.
We then cut to the most annoying, worthless characters of the whole movie. A fat white kid and a skinny black kid. The black kid constantly bosses the white kid around, and they're always up to no good. We first see them looking at porn while their parents are out playing bingo. There's then a knock at the door, which they assume is their parents. If it was their parents, I don't know why they'd bother knocking, but I guess we needed this bit to set up the "funny" scene of showing the kids slowly scrambling to try to hide their porn. They could have easily pushed all the magazines under the couch, but they instead decide to put a couple under the couch, some under the rug, some under the chair cushion, all while calling out to the knocking, "In a minute! Almost there!" Finally, after what feels like forever, they answer the door to the leech monster. They then close the door and let out what was supposed to be a comedic scream. Again, I'm not sure why the mindless monster bothered to patiently knock at the door while it took the kids 10 minutes to hide their dirty magazines, but what do I know?
Luckily for the kids, Swamp Thing shows up in time to save them, although he does destroy their trailer park in the process. The fight ends with the leech monster catching fire and running into the swamp. It's an exact ripoff of the best part of the first movie — when Alec Holland caught fire — but it's not nearly as impressive. Well, the cops soon show up, Swamp Thing disappears, and the kids decide not to tell the newspaper reporters about him because they want to take a picture of him first and sell it for $10,000.
We then see Dr. Arcane reading the paper about the event, and although Swamp Thing was explicitly not mentioned, he knows it was him. Arcane then finally has that dinner with his stepdaughter, so either the newspapers down there are incredibly fast and got out an evening edition, or he waited to do anything with his guest until the next day. Well anyway, at the dinner, he proves his love for his dead wife by giving Abby a ring he says belonged to her mother. If Abby was as close to her mom as was implied, she should have recognized the ring. But logic doesn't apply to this movie, as evident by Abby's desire to immediately put on the ring of her dead mother. Of course, Arcane rigged the ring to cut her, which gives him the necessary blood sample. Apparently this cut was quite traumatic, and Abigail decides to run away right there and then, in nothing but her fancy little dress that she will continue to wear for the rest of the movie.
Abby immediately runs across some moonshiners who naturally try to rape her. But luckily Swamp Thing saves the day. She immediately falls in love with him and he gives her the abbreviated version of his origin. And we actually see the cool scene where Alec Holland caught on fire in the first movie. So not only did this movie poorly re-create the flaming man scene, but then they also replayed the original. Whatever. I'm quite annoyed with everything right now, so let's get through this end quickly.
Swamp Thing and Abby are madly in love, but quite sad that they can't have sex, so he pulls a celery stalk off his waist, bites it, and gives it to her. When she bites it, we get a very strange hallucination of her making out with a human Swamp Thing. They're then found by the boys who want to take a picture with Swamp Thing. While they're posing, Abby gets kidnapped by Arcane's men, who then blow Swamp Thing up with a grenade.
There's then a poorly developed subplot of Lana, one of Arcane's doctors/current lover, turning against him for absolutely no reason whatsoever. But illogical actions are the norm here, just as is Lana's decision to take a bath, but never get in the tub. But that had to happen so they could show Swamp Thing ooze in through the tub faucet and reform himself in the tub. It would have been a cool scene if it had a better setup.
Well, some stuff happens, I guess, and we finally get to the climax. Arcane kills Abby by draining her life energy to save himself, but it didn't fully work because Lana sabotaged the experiment. So he kills her, then Swamp Thing finally makes his way down to the secret lab to battle ... not Arcane, but the other doctor who has turned into a very cheap and crappy looking monster. He's completely the same, but now has a big head, which flops around a lot whenever he gets punched. They really should have used the better-looking leech monster at the end of the movie.
Swamp Thing naturally defeats the big-headed monster, but unnaturally initiates the self destruct sequence in the lab. Why does it ... oh, never mind! Arcane somehow had a door fall on him, so he just sits there and shrugs while Swamp Thing leaves with Abby's body. The house then blows up and Swamp Thing revives his girlfriend. For some reason, a little flower grows on her foot, and she resolves to spend the rest of her life in the swamp with the giant plant monster. The idiot kids then take a bunch of pictures of this final scene, but halfway through the credits, we learn that they didn't have any film. Oh those kids whose names I never bothered to learn!
Ugh. That became painful at the end. Usually I love writing about bad movies, but this one was tough because it had plenty of potential to be a decent movie. The suit looked great, and this director showed a great willingness to keep all the action at night and use more monsters. But then they had to kill all that potential by trying to make it a spoofy comedy. By itself, I should probably give this movie a zero, but since it was actually better than the original, I will give it a mercy point.
Final score: 1
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