Mutant snakehead fish run amok in a small Louisiana town. Not a bad template from which to craft a fun b-movie, but SNAKEHEAD SWAMP is anything but fun. The potentially entertaining plot is spoiled by sorry effects that never make the monstrous fish remotely believable, much less frightening. The director might have tried showing less of the snakeheads to build up suspense instead of throwing the silly looking monsters at us full on, but one gets the impression there was little intention to make a truly thrilling movie on any level. The script makes fun of itself at every opportunity, so much so that it goes way beyond camp and seems to actually wallow in self loathing, as though everyone involved realizes they are in a terrible movie and want you to know that yes, they know it too. The monster action is lackluster and even the explanation for what caused the outbreak of killer fish remains muddled: was it because a truck crashed into the river with unnatural cargo inside, or due to a voodoo curse, or both? The question is never really answered, and I guess the viewer isn't supposed to think about it too much. The main characters, which range from a crazy old voodoo guy who lives in the swamp to a gang of young people on a boating trip and a female park ranger, are uniformly bad and underdeveloped even by the standards of b-films. In defense of the cast, however, I think the utter hopelessness of the characters has more to do with how they are written (or not) rather than due to the talent of the actors involved, most of whom do a pretty good job with the material as it is. The same cast might have done quite well with a better script to work from, and/or a director with a better handle on things. Sometimes for all their flaws b-movies are tremendously entertaining, but SNAKEHEAD SWAMP never manages to be anything but a very slow, painful experience in dramatic futility.
Review of SnakeHead Swamp
