Review: “Swamp Thing”

DAUBERMAN, Gary, & Mark VERHEIDEN (Creators), “Swamp Thing – The Complete Series”, DC/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2019.

One interesting aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is its affect upon the release of cinematic and televisual material. Stuff is still coming to TV and being released on DVD or BluRay, but it’s stuff that, it seems, the production houses aren’t too proud of, or which, they’re hoping, no-one is paying any attention to. For example, this week saw the release of “Birds of Prey” to DVD which – as far as I’m aware – didn’t even make it to the local cinemas. Given the hype in months previous, this thing definitely seemed to be slipped under the radar; having now watched it, I can see why. Even before “Suicide Squad” was finished, I knew it would be a piece of garbage; I felt justified in thinking that any sequel, or spin-off, from that joke would be similarly lacklustre. And whaddaya know? Right again.

(Essentially, this is misbegotten trash that doesn’t know what it is, or what it’s doing. All I have to say is, if you’re going to try and make a movie with a bent chronology and a fourth wall-breaking narrator in the style of “Pulp Fiction” or a “Deadpool” flick, the first thing on your ‘to do’ list is to check that you’re Quentin Tarantino, Tim Miller or David Leitch. Are you Quentin Tarantino, Tim Miller or David Leitch? Of course not, so try something else.)

“Swamp Thing” on the other hand was probably slated for a DVD release at this time anyway - having been screened in the US at about this point last year - and, given the lock-down, there was probably no real reason to not let it out into the world on disc. TV series have definitely come into their own in these stay-at-home-and-binge-watch times. That being said, I watched “Birds” and then felt overcome with reluctance about diving into the swamp – DC’s woeful track record had been stringently adhered to up until that point and I didn’t feel like wallowing in any more if its crapulence.

Instead, I tried to think back over the DCEU’s entire cinematic and televisual back-catalogue to date and work out what exactly stood out from its extended universe of false starts and misfires. It boiled down to “Man of Steel”, “Gotham”, “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman” (I know I’m pretty much alone on some of these choices, but seriously “Man of Steel” wasn’t that bad – and is now unavailable, withdrawn from distribution – and “Aquaman” had some very pretty cinematography). (You’ll notice I’m not putting Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” movies in this selection – they actually form no part of the DCEU for some reason, and we should all be glad of that.) So, you can imagine that I was hesitant to jump into yet another onerous waste of time…

Surprise, surprise! There is a lot to like here. When I finally felt motivated enough to feed the disc into the DVD player and get underway, I was overcome with a pleasant sense of relief. “Swamp Thing” is actually not bad at all, and it repays investigation. A few caveats here: when I say it’s “not bad”, I mean it’s quite good. There are some patchy performances here and there and some questionable content, but, on balance, it’s completely watchable and engaging. As an indicator, if you’ve watched any of the “Arrowverse” shows, it leaves them all for dead. That’s a big plus.

To offer some backstory, the character of Swamp Thing came out of some comics material that was somewhat more EC – the old horror comics of the 50s and 60s - than DC. Those publications helped bring about the Comics Code which altered the four-colour world forever: they were replete with creations such as this - shambling horrors lurching through dismal terrain. This was an early attempt to write and devise such a character as a narrative hero. Confusingly however, in 1971, Marvel had already unleashed a very similar version of this character called “Man Thing”, a year or so before Swamp Thing; it turns out that Len Wein - the credited creator of Swamp Thing – had also spawned Man Thing while slumming for Marvel; however, with all of the comics talent at the time co-habiting and cross-pollinating their ideas, early grumbles about litigious action were shelved when it turned out that the early story arcs of both characters made them quite separate and unique entities (Swamp Thing has a mind and self-consciousness for example, while Man Thing does not).

(The other thing that Man Thing had as distinct from Swamp Thing was an inadvertently ludicrous book title. The phrase "man thing" was one coined by Stan Lee while writing the Hulk and the Fantastic Four's the Thing, and is the sort of melodramatic phrase that hallmarks the early Marvel writing style. The comics writers weren't crazy about it as their new creation's name, but they bowed to Stan "the Man". Later, Man Thing got its own book -  a sparsely-coloured omnibus series, with a Man Thing story up front and then some other horror-themed, EC-inspired tales following up. As it was larger than the standard Marvel book format it was entitled "Giant Sized Man Thing". Anyone else seeing the problem here?)

There are certainly antecedents for such characters – the lovelorn monster, hated and reviled despite having a heart of gold and separated from the one it loves by its monstrous condition is a well-worn trope. We’ve seen it in Frankenstein (although probably only in versions not adhering too closely to the original), the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame – even the Creature from the Black Lagoon. King Kong also springs to mind. To begin with, Swamp Thing followed a traditional revenge schtick: Alec Holland and his wife are killed by eco-terrorists and he gets reincarnated as Louisiana swamp ooze in order to seek vengeance. After the inevitable tangled skein of comics plotting that followed thereafter, he becomes a guardian of the planet, self-styled avatar of “the Green”, that is, the vegetable consciousness of the Earth.

A number of boots and re-boots followed over the years as new writers came and went and the DC underwent various ructions – Crisis on Infinite Earths; The New 52 – and, as is usual, standard characters in any story arc get re-invented, replaced and discarded according to whim. This series is largely based upon the fifth re-boot of the character which attempted to put the genie back into some kind of bottle after way too long out in the tall grass. This is a Good Thing. Thanks to the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, DC’s supernatural characters all came of age in the 80s and are – arguably – the best things about the DC product - the sooner they motivate a big screen Justice League Dark the better, is what I say. Comics titles such as Hellblazer, Black Orchid and Matt Wagner’s take on The Demon all demonstrated that this was a strength in the canon – the single issue of Swamp Thing entitled “The Anatomy Lesson” demonstrated it more than adequately, what with all of the industry awards that it won. And yet we get “Batman V Superman” (I’m still not convinced that that’s not a Roman numeral 5 in there…).

Essentially, we get a trimmed back, leaner scenario for this series. The town of Marais in Louisiana is affected by an unknown infectious disease and CDC investigator Abby Arcane (it’s a holdover name from an earlier character) is recalled to her hometown to check things out. She meets a privately-contracted scientist – biologist Alec Holland – working for community big-wig Avery Sunderland, and he compels her to investigate the local swamp and the pollutants being dumped there as a possible cause. Just as they start to unravel what’s going on, Holland is killed by a paid assassin and his body is lost in the swamp – only to re-emerge later as the titular ‘Thing. The rest is the kind of well-plotted train-ride to Whodunnit and Why that we’ve all come to expect from TV these days. There are some unusual additions and addenda, the inclusion of which I question but, on the whole, they serve to help things along.

Full disclosure: back in the day, I was a Blue Devil comic collector.

I collected comics fairly avidly through the 80s (after they became available here in their original formats for the first time) and I collected a bunch of things at random that piqued my interest in terms of narrative, or if the artist caught my eye. Paris Cullins had a clean and neat line-style that I enjoyed and – since the Blue Devil was just being launched and I had nothing else I was collecting at the time – I began faithfully to pick up each issue. The storyline was definitely tongue-in-cheek – the character was posited in order to rope in various other big hitters from other books and have a bit of fun with them, which is why Blue Devil meets Superman, Green Lantern and Zatanna within the first five or so issues. The character doesn’t take itself too seriously and pokes fun at superheroics in general – at the time (1986) it was fresh and unusual. Eventually, the character would start to assemble all of the overlooked DC supernatural characters - the Creeper, the Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, the Demon, Man Bat – as allies, and talk of a supernatural Justice League began to be bandied about. I lasted until issue 20 – had I known that there would be only another 12 issues, I probably would have stuck around ‘til the end, but the artist had changed several times and the writers were quitting, so I figured I’d get out while I was ahead. Imagine my surprise to discover that Blue Devil is a character in this TV series!

Not that it’s a good thing. The character is established as a movie role (as it was in the comics) played by a doofus actor and made to look good by Daniel Cassidy, his stuntman. This is all canon from the book. However, in this iteration, having taken over the lead role and starred as the title character in the movie, Dan Cassidy is bound by a mystical promise to never leave Marais until a “heroine” arrives whom he will aid in her “quest”. Cassidy, the one-hit-wonder, mopes and bitches through this story, unable to just wait until he does the thing he promised he would do, and it all seems to be quite strange and clunky, in comparison with everything else that’s going on. Especially since the part is being played by “EYE-an” Ziering. I guess if you have a pouting, self-entitled, poseur role, you could find a worse actor to play the part. Not by much though…

Anyway, Cassidy complains, tries to leave, finds he can’t, gets thumped into a coma, gets revived from same by the evil experimentation of Jason Woodrue, changes the course of history and rides off into the sunset (Boulevard). Sayonara, Blue Devil! We wonder if we could’ve just done without you this time ‘round…

The good thing that comes along with the Blue Devil here, is the character of Madame Xanadu. In the comics she’s just a mysterious femme fatale with (vague, undefined) mystic powers, a comics “ghost host” from 1978; here she’s revised as a black, tarot-card slinging, blind, hoodoo sorceress, with a rattlesnake on her walking stick and funky snake tattoos on her hands. She brings a nice supernatural edge to the events that helps clarify the ‘not science’ which surrounds Alec Holland’s transformation and opens up the world a bit so that it breaks free of its police procedural roots. I’m sure that they didn’t need to have her riding Blue Devil’s coattails though.

There are some good actors here. Jennifer Beals is always worth the price of admission especially when she gets to do something morally ambiguous like this. Will Patton never really seems convincing as the bad guy and his role as Avery Sunderland seems a little low-key – it works but it doesn’t shine. I’ve always had a soft spot for Virginia Madsen since “Candy Man” and here she doesn’t disappoint. Andy Bean/Derek Mears as the eponymous monster, Jeryl Prescott as Madame Xanadu, Maria Sten and Henderson Wade all grab their roles and go for it. Kevin Durand is always a bit too ‘Nicholas Cage’ for me, but he does okay here. My main concern was Crystal Reed as Abby Arcane. Obviously, the writers wanted a way into this scenario for the audience and they thought that following the returning scientist to her hometown and having her rake up all of her past trash would be the way to go. Yes, and no. If this is the line you take, you cast someone more convincing - not the gamine, waif-like, jumper-sleeve twisting naïf that this portrayal offers. This role screamed out for some cynicism and a steel core; instead, we got Bambi. No disrespect to Ms. Reed, but this was not her gig.

As for the production design and so forth, there’s a sense that this show is making do with what it’s got, but that’s not a bad thing. Overreaching will always bring a show down and this one knows not to push things too hard. The focus is on the characters here rather than special effects and, fortunately, this is the sort of vehicle where you can let things breathe a little. Swamp Thing’s ‘powers’ are always a little low-key and undefined anyway, and the writers and directors know to not let the superheroics get in the way of the story. Again, this is where the Blue Devil insertions threaten to blow down the house of cards. Not quite, but almost.

In the final analysis, this won’t knock your socks off, but it’s good all-round value for your hard-earned. If you have to stay inside on the couch for the interim, there are worse things you could be watching…

Three Tentacled Horrors.