Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Swamp Thing       Based on a DC Comics character, Swamp Thing (1982), directed by Wes Craven, uses the science experiment gone wrong idea to propel its story.  Adrienne Barbeau, impressive not only physically but also performance-wise, plays replacement scientist Alice Cable, one of several curiously named people in this entertaining creature feature shot in a South Carolina cypress swamp.      Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks ) is Dr. Alec Holland, a plant enthusiast researching the effects of a serum resembling flat Mountain Dew.  He works with his sister in a sealed laboratory located in a small ghost town flooded long ago.  With the confidence of a practiced ladies' man, Alec Holland flirts with Alice Cable but to no avail.  She's a bit grossed out by the swamp, the bugs, the heat, the calf-deep water hiding God knows what.  Alec Holland, by contrast, rhapsodizes about the same environment.  Hi...

     Fish People      "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."                                                                          H.P. Lovecraft      "Dagon" (1919) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936) by Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) provide the inspiration for Stuart Gordon's 2001 horror film, Dagon , a blending of humor, weirdness, and ickiness, working well due to a quickly unfolding premise and atmosphere characterized by relentless rain and a setting made terrible by villagers worshipping an ancient sea god, Dagon.      Many years before the present of the story, the village of Imboco, suffering from lack of the formerly abundant fishing that brought prosperi...

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