Swamp Devil (2008) Poster, Photos, Trailer, Raw Reviews

SYNOPSIS

The dark secrets of a small town in America’s deep south are revealed after a series of gruesome murders. When local resident Howard Blaine is accused of the crimes, his daughter Melanie attempts to clear his name but she soon finds out that the real killer is not even human.

Swamp Devil 90 minutes RHI FILMS Directed by David Winning Starring BRUCE DERN
This is David Winning’s 13th Feature Film, he has directed over 20 series, including Stargate: Atlantis, with over 90 TV credits. The southern bogs are among the most amazing of all the habitats on Earth, a mile-wide slow-moving river of grass and decay, home to an amazing array of wildlife. Some wilder than others.

Responding to a call that her estranged father, Howard, is dying, Melanie Blaime returns home to the nearly deserted small southern town of Gibbington. Once there, her friend, Jimmy Fulle, comes clean with the truth: Melanie’s father is not dying but rather on the run and in hiding from charges that he murdered a teenage girl in the swamps—the latest in a string of grisly slayings. But when the sheriff is attacked and killed, it is clear that the culprit is someone, or something else. And there’s something funny about that swamp…
If a foul vine-choked mass of mud and earth rises from a swamp and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? Swamp Devil will let you know.

Director: David Winning
Writers: Gary Dauberman (story), Gary Dauberman (teleplay) …
Genre: Horror
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Color
Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1
Certification: Australia:M (2008)
Filming Locations: Montréal, Québec, Canada
Company: Muse Entertainment Enterprises

Cast:
Bruce Dern … Howard Blaime
Cindy Sampson … Melanie Blaime
Nicolas Wright … Jimmy Fuller
Robert Higden … Jones
Allison Graham … Deputy Jolene Harris
James Kidnie … Sheriff Nelson Bois
Bronwen Mantel … Shelly
Kwasi Songui … Bigg
Mari-Pier Gaudet … Lisa (as Mary-Pier Gaudet)
Jenna Wheeler-Hughes … Young Dream Girl
Marc V. Denis … Young Howard (as Marc Viger Denis)

FANGORIA REVIEW

Seventeen years ago, a woman was found dead in a desolate Vermont swampland. The only suspect in the case was the woman’s husband and town’s sheriff, Howard Blaime (Bruce Dern), who promptly tossed his daughter out of town and became a hermit. After a hasty title sequence, SWAMP DEVIL fast-forwards to the present, with a duplicate murder rocking the same sleepy little burg and wacky ol’ Howard being blamed for the crime.
SWAMP DEVIL

Local boy Jimmy (Nicolas Wright) immediately calls upon Howard’s estranged daughter to help prove her absent dad’s innocence, but as soon as Melanie (Cindy Sampson) shows up, things start becoming…peculiar. Jimmy isn’t your normal young man, and his diner owner/magical healer mother is even less so. To top that, Melanie doesn’t recall knowing Jimmy from her youth, even though he assures her they were close friends—and his hands always seem to be covered in swamp mud. When a lynch mob sent into the woods suddenly begins losing members, it becomes startlingly clear to everyone that there’s a swamp devil on the loose.

Yes, a swamp devil. If you’re unfamiliar with this piece of totally fabricated folklore, just think of it as a cross between one of LORD OF THE RINGS’ Ents and…well, that’s exactly what it is: a giant, vine-encrusted walking tree. It tromps around, wrapping vines around people’s legs and smashing them under its enormous root-legs.

Melanie finds daddy Howard, who reveals that the creature was responsible for her mother’s death, and the duo partners up with a gaggle of local yokels (including members of the mob sent out to kill her dad) to get sweet treevenge on the hulking green ghoul. But where has weird Jimmy gone? Let’s just say I’m not giving anything away by revealing that his mysterious past is setting him up to be…well, exactly what you think he is. Subtlety is not one of this film’s strongest points.

Yet even with a few faults, SWAMP DEVIL actually supersedes a great number of recent Sci Fi Originals. It has a fine cast, nice (although limited) production design and a pretty cool-looking monster. The fact that someone at Sci Fi was able to wrangle Bruce Dern into this project in the first place is a shock, and his chemistry with the adorable Sampson lends an air of emotional credibility to an otherwise one-note film.

Director David Winning does what he can with the script by Gary Dauberman and Ethlie Ann Vare, which is neither impressive or shameful. While it’s far from perfect—providing plenty of painfully obvious hints as to what’s happening—the characters fulfill their purposes acceptably before being offed, and the dialogue is relatively tight (minus Jimmy’s hokey comment about his mother: “Mom, fishing buddy, and paramedic. I’m lucky to have her!”). The only real beef comes with setting a swamp film in Vermont—one of the least swampy states in the union.

Perhaps what makes SWAMP DEVIL rise of the mediocrity of other Sci Fi Originals is what it doesn’t have in it: There’s no tough-as-nails military team, no secret society and—as it was shot in Canada—no bad Bulgarian accents. The excessive digital FX are also above average for the station’s output, although most of the film is set during the daytime, leaving plenty of room to nitpick the copious footage of the computer-generated menace. A few shots involving practical monster hands are effective, and a grim reminder that the beast would have looked substantially more menacing if it had been realized wholly in this fashion.

At the end of the day, SWAMP DEVIL pulls no punches about what it is—a throwaway monster flick that borrows heavily from SWAMP THING and the vine-attack sequence from EVIL DEAD II. It’s certainly not going to change your opinion about Sci Fi flicks, but if you’ve already sat through most of the network’s offerings this year, you might find this devil a step or two ahead of the pack.

IMDB REVIEW

Good cast let down by trashy special effects

When I saw that Sky 3 were showing a film called Swamp Devil, I decided to watch it for the light entertainment value as I didn’t expect the plot to require much mental effort and I felt like winding down. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the performances of all the main actors, especially the captivating Nicolas Wright who really made you want to know more about his character. It was therefore such a huge disappointment when he morphed into the swamp devil, I mean, you saw it coming a mile off, but the actual transformation was such a let-down and the creature itself raised more than just a titter. Fine if this was a trashy B movie, but the actors involved had already raised it way above that level with their sensitive performances. Clearly the director did not share their emotion and was happy with an animated monster than any self-respecting speed-skating Citroen C4 could put to shame, and a real-life version that had all the agility and grace of the Eddy Monster that comes on stage at the end of an Iron Maiden concert. I got the impression that the director looked at the final version of the film, thought ‘Damn, those swamp devils don’t really work, but it’s too late to do anything about that now.’ and put it out anyway. A disservice to a strong cast who did their utmost to make this film believable, which was a truly commendable achievement under the circumstances.

TRAILER