SwampoftheRavens

The Swamp of the Ravens (1974)

This is your basic twisted mad scientist movie. You have a doctor that decides death can be cheated or used to make people more perfect. At first he just experiments on what appears to be the recently dead. Sure creepy, but I suppose not all that disturbing. But then when his girl tries to leave him for her former boyfriend, a lounge singer, he loses his mind. He kills her then starts to collect the blood from working girls to bring her back. Not sure how this is supposed to work, as the plot is a bit murky on this point.

Hell saying that the movie has a plot is stretching it a bit. The best part of this movie is the beginning with the doctor trying to reanimate a guy in the back of a moving van. Seriously I had a lot of hope for the movie just from this sequence, which is executed nicely and fun. But after 5 minutes, around the time the dialogue begins things go to hell. You get a series of flashbacks showing the doctor sitting in a dark room answering questions about his less then ethical research. This is combined with more flashbacks of him stealing his girlfriend away from the lounge singer. I suppose this is so that we understand why he kills her when she goes back to him. Though I have to correct myself. The best part about the movie is actually the song that the singer performs when she comes back to him. It is a love song for a dead robot that he sings to a mannequin!

Now I know this sounds cool, but other then a couple of weird scenes like this The Swamp of the Ravens is a real mess. The narrative jumps around and the characters are hard to follow. The tone of the movie is serious one minute, then filled with a wise cracking cop the next. I found it exceedingly difficult to follow and started watching the clock to see how much longer it was going to be on after 10 or 15 minutes.

I could talk about special effects, but in spite of being a movie about reanimated bodies there isn’t much here. Heck even the leper is basically a guy with what looks like dried oatmeal on his face. The kills don’t happen on screen and overall the movie is very tame, even for the early ‘70s. This movie also suffers from the curse of many imports from the ‘60s and ‘70s, terrible dubbing. The main characters are voiced pretty well, but some of the supporting characters are terrible. The print that was used for this DVD is very dark and at times and hard to see. Then again it wouldn’t surprise me if this is the best that they had to work with. I had never heard of The Swamp of the Ravens before this DVD from VCI Entertainment showed up in the mail and it is obvious to me why that is the case.

I will give the movie some credit for the only dead robot love song I’ve ever heard, but I can’t recommend the DVD. If you are still interested in spite of my review The Swamp of the Ravens is available on a double feature with I Eat Your Skin (which does nothing to enhance the disc).

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer