InjunNose Review of Swamp of the Lost Souls

Swamp of the Lost Souls (1957)

Silly, pointless mishmash of mystery, horror, and Western genres.

[2/10 · 18 May 2007]

Professional bullfighter Gaston Santos ("and his horse Moonlight!", the opening credits proclaim) stars in "Swamp of the Lost Monster", a Mexican cheapie whose English-dubbed version was produced by K. Gordon Murray. Mr. Murray was the cinematic giant who brought us "The Robot Vs. the Aztec Mummy" and other examples of bad south-of-the-border movie-making. "Swamp" is different from the usual Murray fare in a couple of important respects: it's in color, and it's not a straight horror film. It's difficult to imagine what motivated the creators of "Swamp of the Lost Monster"--there aren't enough mystery or horror or Western trappings to satisfy fans of any one of those genres. The plot revolves around a missing corpse, that of a man who may have died of some unknown, highly contagious disease. A ridiculous-looking aquatic monster (referred to a couple of times in the dubbed version of the film as a "Martian"), a saloon shootout and some bad comedy are thrown into the mix just for shits and giggles. "Swamp" has absolutely nothing going for it except its oddness, but the film is odd only in the most pedestrian sense. It's not laughably bad like an Ed Wood movie, or downright bizarre like the works of Herschell Gordon Lewis--it's just unclassifiable and, ultimately, uninteresting. Watching it on "Commander USA's Groovie Movies", as I did about twenty-five years ago, made it seem a lot more entertaining. One footnote: there are, strangely enough, two or three nicely photographed moments in the film. The best of these is when the monster emerges from the river and pulls a screaming victim back down into the muddy depths with him. Hopefully the cinematographer went on to better things.