Swamp Devil

Jimmy Fuller (Nicolas Wright) asks Melanie Blaine (Cindy Sampson) to come home to check on her sick father Howard (Bruce Dern). But there's something worst than sickness going on, Jimmy tells her that her father is actually suspected of murdering a 17 year old girl.

There is something in the woods. Only it's a horrible CG creation. It's horrible in the sense that it's unrealistic looking, and not scary. Part of it is the cheap CG. Part of it is the fact that it's all daylight shots. Everybody knows creepy creatures are scarier at night. The backstory and the mystery adds a little interest in the movie. If they had more money and better actors, they could have made a passable horror.

Swamp Devil was not a good movie, but it is not a terrible one either and it could have been much worse. It is decently shot, has some good scenery, has an eerie score and the cast are above average particularly from Bruce Dern and Nicholas Wright. However, the effects are very poor, often crude above all else and the transformation sequences are just as bad. The monster does lack any kind of menace, you know nothing about why it behaves like it does and it is over-used which dilutes any sense of tension. The dialogue is very clunky, while the story rarely does engage often coming across as predictable with no sense of tense atmosphere and any lack of suspense in any scenes featuring the monster and the characters are little more than underdeveloped cardboard cut-outs. All in all, could have been worse, but is lacking in a lot of areas. 4/10 Bethany Cox

I bought this years ago, and enjoyed it far more than I thought I would! The only down side was the dvd had horrible sound distortions every other minute in the first 15 min or so. I picked up a three pack of films tonight that happened to include Swamp Devil, popped it in and it the distortions were gone! Glad someone fixed the error! So if you buy a new copy, you should be good to go!

This is a really flat movie that I have seen, but it's not the worst in the series. There's not that much to the story because not that happened other than the characters are hunting for someone and discovered a truth. The whole plotline about the father accused of murder ended pretty quickly because the movie shows the monster pretty early, so we already know that his not the murderer. Most of the movie isn't that interesting to watch because there's little interesting ideas to be found in this movie and is really dull for most of the time. The scenes with the creature aren't that exciting because he doesn't do that much other than shooting vines at his victims and twisting with it. It is really obvious what it is. The climax itself is underwhelming, and I didn't like how the movie ended. I do think it's interesting to have a swamp creature as the villain because movies rarely use it. The creature does have a unique design on it, but the CGI doesn't look impressive at all. There's also a backstory to it, but I wish it was flesh-out more to be interesting and have more details to it.

Bruce Dern (!) gets top billing in this no-budget, made-for-cable clunker about a murderous swamp monster (looking suspiciously at times like Swamp Thing or Man-Thing). A young woman returns to her hometown to find out what happened to her missing dad, a former sheriff suspected in a series of gruesome killings. An odd fellow about her age pops up out of nowhere and befriends her, while the local constabulary and a gun-toting local almost kill her upon her arrival. She eventually finds her dad (Dern) hiding in the woods, and together they fight the creature. The creature is typical SyFy Channel CGI, and not particularly intimidating or scary-looking. The director shows way too much of it, and way too early on. Acting is par for the genre. A snoozer, ideal for those having trouble sleeping.