GARBAGE DAY!!

Hello Anturn. Sadly not a lot is left of the Powerbabe game. I've asked various people who worked on it for anything they might have left, but there's really nothing.

That said, I have found certain things. The founder of the studio, Camilla Lyngbo Wolden-Ræthinge has re-entered the game development scene and is making a spiritual sequel to the game now, which you can read more about here: https://fightlikeagirlgames.com/

Powerbabe started out named Bitch-spillet (or "The bitch game") and was an attempt to take back some of the ugly names used by girls against other girls around the school yards, in a feminist bid for empowerment. After it had been running for a year or two at Pinkfloor's own website, they made a deal with DR (The Danish Radio broadcast company) to host it on their SKUM subsite for Danish youths, where it became immensely popular. In fact it became so popular that DR itself produced a short documentary on it, which is currently unavailable, locked away somewhere in the DR archives. Part of this documentary has however been included in the documentary "Loading - historien om Danmarks spilpionerer" available here: https://www.dr.dk/drtv/serie/loading-_-historien-om-danmarks-spilpionerer_282628 (if you're locked out of viewing it, you might need a Danish VPN) Eventually Pinkfloor was bought out by Egmont who had big plans for expanding the brand into a transmedia franchise. A YA book was made ("Powerbabe Level 1" - https://www.dba.dk/recommerce/forsale/item/2158670), as well as a mobile J2ME game ("Power Babe: Flirt Club" - https://djuzz.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/featured-game-powerbabe-flirt-club-hovr/).

On top of that a pilot of a TV-series ("The Powerbabe Show") was shot, which has, uh, *not* aged gracefully. I am currently uploading it to the Internet Archive, where you should be able to find it shortly. The source is a promotional DVD-R that I managed to stumble upon that appears to have been made to try and sell the show to potential distributors.

As you mentioned there was indeed a prototype produced of the Powerbabe PS2 game. I sadly do not have a copy of that, but I know that Andrew Borman of the Strong Museum *do* in fact have a copy. If you somehow come across one, please let me know so I can make sure the Royal Danish Library can put it into the national collection.

Today, let's have a look at a Bollywood classic. Jaani Dushman has got it all, a spooky ghost werewolf:

The dumbest tug-of-war toxic masculinity fest of all time:

And some frankly incredibly editing choices:

And of course plenty of catchy song and dance sequences that will force you to purchase the soundtrack.

Many years ago, just after being wed, a groom is poisoned by his bride, who secretly had another lover, but needed the money of groom to be able to live comfortably with him. The groom dies full of anger and malice, and returns from the dead as a ghost to possess other new grooms and murder their brides.

A curse strikes the nearby village, brides being carried in their marriage procession are disappearing and dying all over the place! No-one are safe! The local authorities start sending protection with the processions, but the brides just keep disappearing and everyone are at their wits end.

But this being Bollywood, we are introduced to like fifteen different characters in various love triangles, all who wanting to get married, and most worrying more about dowries and class than the almost guaranteed death of themselves or the people they love.

We are explained all the rules about ghosts early on in the film: The possess the bodies of living people and jump form one body to another when it dies. It can only be destroyed when its spirit is broken, and a possessed body can always be recognized based on five tell-tale signs:

Not a single one of the signs turn out to occur at any point in the movie. But I figure that the fact that the possessed person turn into a wolf-man is a pretty good indicator on its own...

Surprisingly this one actually doesn't have a lot to warn about as far as potential triggers. There's a few very short scenes were men non-consentually grab women in an attempt to SA them, but every instance is stopped immediately and is entirely non-graphic.

I highly recommend this movie. It's goofy and the plot is mostly unimportant, but it's fairly short for a Bollywood movie (2½ hours), and it has a lot of fun stuff:

And finally a bit of fan service for all you weirdos:

Today we'll be talking about a movie by Sion Sono - one of the rare directors that both fully indulges in schlock, while also having his movies contain messages, likeable 3-dimensional characters and just generally being good. You know, like your Tarantinos or Takashi Miikes.

EXTE tackles some difficult topics while also being completely over the top at other times, and for that reason I'll give two content warnings right out of the gate:

1: The movie contains a very realistic portrayal of a mother physically and mentally abusing her young daughter. I will not be showing any of that here.

2: The movie contains tons of disturbing gross-out body stuff - specifically long hair supernaturally growing places that it shouldn't, such as out of the eyes, out of wounds and from under fingernails. I will absolutely be showing a bunch of that in this post.

A dead woman is found in a shipping container filled with hair for use in the production of hair extensions. It seems that she was the victim of human trafficking, and as we later learn, human experimentation.

The corpse gets send to the police's forensic lab/morgue, where it falls into the hands of a creepy mortician with a hair fetish, who has secretly been cutting the hair of dead women for his own collection.

This guy gives some real cartoony mad scientist vibes, which are at odds with the very real life issues that the central protagonists of the movie are dealing with, causing a sorta surreal feeling to the entire thing.

Our protagonist is Yuko, a hair-stylist in training - as she explains herself in a fully in-universe diagetic exposition scene, in which she talks about herself in the third person because she saw someone do that in a TV show the other day and thought it was fun.

Yuki has recently moved out from a bad living situation with her abusive sister, and is now living together with a roommate who aims to become a professional dancer. Yuki herself has dreamt of becoming a hair stylist since she was a little girl, and is working hard towards achieving that dream. The hair salon she is an apprentice at has a big workshop in a few days, where she and her colleagues will have to show if they have what it takes - but first they will have to find models.

Meanwhile creepy hair fetishist guy notices that the corpse from the hair container is growing hair really quickly... And from places where you don't normally grow hair. So he smuggles her home to his private hair shrines, where he starts talking to her and eventually cutting her hair.

Back at Yuki's place, a child has shown up at the doorstop. It's her niece Mami, whom her sister has just left there while she does her own thing in some shady nightclub.

Yuki soon realises that Mami, much like herself, has been abused by her sister, and ends up confronting and standing up to her sister, to allow Mami to live safely with her and her roommate instead.

Of course creepy hair fetishist guy starts selling hair extensions made form hair that he has cut off from the weird corpse that supernaturally grows hair. He visits various small hair salons who are all amazed at the free samples he gives them.

When worn, these extensions start leading to... Accidents...

The hair extensions seem to have a life on their own - and a terrible anger that starts taking root...

Speaking of taking root...

It doesn't take long before the hair extensions have also found their way to Yuki's hair salon - and she's about to have to pick a model for her big test! Luckily she has a very wholesome bonding experience with Mami...

And I think I'll just leave things there. I very much enjoyed EXTE. It's genuinely disturbing while also being slightly silly. Give it a watch this Halloween!

Today's feature is an infamous old Roger Corman flick. Everyone reading this are probably well aware of who Roger Corman is, but if not here's a quick summary: Roger Corman is a pioneer of super low-budget schlock. He was active as a director in the 1950s and 1960s, making Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft adaptations starring Vincent Price, directing the original Little Shop of Horrors and creature features with titles like "It Conquered the World", "Attack of the Crab Monster", "Swamp Women", "Teenage Cave Man", "She Gods of Shark Reef", "The Wasp Woman" etc. More importantly Corman eventually took on the role of producer of low-budget grindhouse movies and helped lunch a thousand careers by giving unknown directors the chance to show what they could do with minimal budgets such as Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins). In this particular case we're dealing with a comedy movies parodying old spy films. A sort of Roger Corman "Austin Powers", "Naked Gun" or "Johnny English" I suppose.

The jokes are hardly the high point, but they are also not painful to watch, which puts it above the admittedly very low bar of the vast majority of bad comedies. It's more "sensible chuckle" than lough out loud funny is what I'm trying to say.

Of course this movie isn't noteworthy for its hot takes on 50s secret agent movies. The star of the show is the titular creature of the Haunted Sea:

But we will get to that. First the plot: In a wonderfully animated segment by Sergio Aragonés of MAD Comics fame we are introduced to the setup. A coup has happened in Cuba and the old guard is making off with all of the contents of the treasury to bide their time elsewhere and plan their own coup:

Robert Towne (the writer of Chinatown and Mission: Impossible) plays the secret agent XK150 (a model of sports car) and is instructed by XK120 to go undercover as a crew member on a ship that is smuggling the contents of the Cuban treasury out of the country. XK120 is also introduced playing a game of chess against herself, which she handily wins right as XK150 enters.

I can only imagine how long she has been sitting there, waiting for him to drop by so she could reveal her great achievement of beating herself at chess. A very normal thing to do.

As a side-note I tried looking up the position, to see if it was referencing some great play - but it turns out this position has never once happened in real life.

I probably should lower my expectations just slightly.

The Cuban gold is being transported along with a Cuban general and his men out of the country on the boat of a crook and owner of a Cuban casino. The Casino owner secretly plans to murder the soldiers, blaming a monster he makes up, dump the gold in an accident, and then come back for it later.

Now, comedy dictates that when he plans to fake monster attacks, a monster with that exact description must also appear. And what a glorious monster it is.

Now, people usually talk bout how terrible looking this creature is, and that is absolutely true. Yet we must not forget that this is a comedy movie, and the monster is directly responsible for the funniest moments in the movie.

I have to believe the monster looking this bad was fully intentional and thereby hugely successful.

That' right. I sad it. The Creature from the Haunted Sea is good actually.

I watched a 1958 Tokusatsu film by the two originators of the Kaiju genre: Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya. Specifically I watched the original Japanese version of The H-Man (美女と液体人間) because a friend had prompted me to put on a movie with the theme of "Slime" and The H-Man certainly fit that bill.

But before we get t some of the best melting people sequences outside of Street Trash we first have to set up the plot and pretend this is going to be a crime mystery film for thirty minutes.

The police has a mystery on their hands! A guy stole a bunch of drugs, but while trying to get away he suddenly disappeared leaving only his clothes behind. Apparently he got undressed and ran off in less than a minute based on how quickly an officer got to the scene. As the police follows various leads another criminal from the same gang suddenly disappear, leaving only his clothes behind, and a VERY shocked girlfriend.

Meanwhile, in one of the most topical scenes in the movie, a scientist contact the police to give them information to help solve the crimes.

The scientist researches the effects of radiation on the human body, and has recently been in contact with two sailors suffering from severe radiation sickness. The sailors told a story of coming across a ghost ship, where the entire crew was gone, leaving only piles of clothes behind. They also had members of their crew touch some slime on the floor which caused them to melt in front of their very eyes.

It also aboard the hip are some glowing green humanoid spectres that also seem to cause people they touch to decompose into goo.

He brings this information to the police, together with data showing that an atom bomb test had happened nearby the ship the sailors had been aboard, which reportedly had been seen in a nearby harbour around the time of the disappearance of the criminals the police were looking for.

Oh, and being a scientist he had tried reproducing the effect of such radiation on living beings (CW: some frogs or toads are shown being a part of these experiments, although there's a cut shortly before they're shown dissolving indicating they've probably been replaced with models - I will not be showing them in this post), and he has successfully done so, as he shows the police officers.

I wasn't expecting how realistically this film would treat cops, especially for a Japanese movie from 1958, but presented with overwhelming evidence the cops react very believably:

It takes an additional half hour of the scientist constantly pestering them with more evidence only to be completely ignored, and also the death of a criminal in front of their very eyes AND the melting of the police chief for them to finally start taking the story seriously.

I'll leave things there without spoiling anything else. But let me just say that after the initial slow first act, this movie turned into so much fun. It had a spooky radioactive ghost ship, slime ghosts, people melting in wonderful 1958 special effects and even some genuine things to say.

It also had some interpretive dance scenes in a night club that were apparently just too hot for American audiences. If someone can tell me the meaning behind these moves I'd love to hear it:

And finally, if nothing else can convince you to put this movie on, this ought to do it:

Just a heads up, this movie has spiders in it, and I will be showing them in this post.

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

In a time of magic, the ruled by an evil overlord worshiping a spider god. However, it is prophesied that he shall one day be overthrown by a hero of good. On the prophesied day of the birth of the hero, a mass infanticide is committed. Where all newborn babies are murdered by the followers of the overlord. But one child is saved, and taken by a mysterious stranger to be raised by an adoptive family, who is of course unaware of the child's true destiny, even though all those baby murders just happened. Now, as a young, strangely muscular and very handsome young man, our hero has fallen in love with his sister, which fortunately his parents are totally okay with, because they're not blood related, and so that's totally fine actually guys. But in the middle of their marriage ceremony, the overlords evil henchmen raid the village, killing everyone and kidnapping The Chosen One's sister-wife. Now it is up to our young hero, dressed in a loincloth and accompanied by a cute but dangerous critter, to save her and bring about the end of the evil tyranny.

Wat, let's focus on that cover again... What sort of animal companion do you think Ator has besides him? He's named "The Fighting Eagle" on the cover, and next to him is a saber-tooth tiger. Perhaps this is ripping off Beastmaster? That one has the hero accompanied by a black panther, an eagle and two mischievous ferrets. Well...

Okay, that is a VERY cute bear cub... I'll let it slide.

Now that Ator has something to avenge and a damsel to save, it is time for him to meet a mysterious stranger from his past with the worst wig you have ever seen, so he can be told of his destiny and also have a training montage.

Soon after Ator gets caught in a tiny net by a group of warrior women however.

Thankfully it all turns out to be a big misunderstanding. You see, as a tribe of amazons, they just need him for a a big fighting tournament, which will decide which one of them will bear the child that will become the next leader of the tribe. Oh, and after that they'll just kill him. But thankfully our himbo is such a pure boy, that he impresses the winner of the tournament with his goal of winning back the love of his life and also slaying the evil warlord and his spider god, that she agrees to let him go, on the condition that she gets to tag along, and get all the treasure. Also, she's definitely not going to be all tsundere about it.

It's around this point that the movie sorta forgets where it's going for a little bit to instead have a little filler chapter or two, in which our himbo protagonist gets himself into trouble because he's too pure for this world. Ator follows the vision of his sister-wife into a cave unaccompanied by his cute animal sidekick and amazon companion. In this cave he meets a mysterious horned woman in a room whose primary furniture seems to be a king-sized bed. The woman offers him a golden chalice containing an unknown liquid to drink, which he immediately does without question.

He then proceeds to have to be rescued from the very obvious Circe-type enchantress trap by his significantly smarter companions.

While Ator & co. are busy side-questing, someone on the writing team remembers that they're supposed to be moving towards a big final battle, and decides to alert the spider-loving big bad, who is conveniently named Daker, exactly like his actor...

And he mobilizes his vast army of exactly ten people to prepare to defend against the guy destined to kick their asses.

I won't spoil the ending, even though you can probably all guess it. Bu I will show off the genuinely cool giant spider, which they make sure to never show too much of at once, which keeps it from looking too goofy. I'm honestly very impressed!

Overall Ator: The Fighting Eagle is a quite charming, if very cliché Italian sword and sorcery flick. It checks off all the boxes, but unlike many such 80s sword and sorcery movies there's no gratuitous nudity, attempted sexual assault scenes or other sleaze, which alone puts it in the better end of the scale (and is honestly surprising given that it was directed by Joe D'Amato, who is best known for his sexploitaiton films). This is the first of four movies featuring Ator and so far only the first and third have had blu-ray releases.

Let's talk about a very silly movie starring Kung Fu Jesus Christ trying to stop a group of vampires from committing hate-crimes. That's right baby, it's Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter!

Things are grim in Ottowa, Canada. A string of vampiric murders have targeted the local lesbian population and severely impacted church memberships to boot. The church decides to pull out their secret weapon...

This alone should be enough to sell you on the movie, but let me just throw in that besides vampires and Jesus it also contains (bad) kung fu and musical elements.

I should however also do my usual content warning for the movie: While it doesn't contain any major sexual assault, homophobic or racist scenes, it does still come from the tradition of Troma pictures, so there is a recurring gag with a female character getting groped, a villainous character french-kissing a corpse, some general distasteful bits and just... So much blasphemy (obviously).

But back to the story:

Jesus gets several make-overs throughout the story, first of which includes a haircut, a couple of earrings and a song-and dance routine in which he proves his might by healing the sick in front of a public crowd.

There's sadly not a lot of diagetic singing and dancing, but the soundtrack does slap, and the movie more than makes up for it with memorable scenes, such as when Jesus has just been out shopping for wood for stakes, but gets accosted by a new enemy:

After which we are treated to a scene of some 30+ atheist combatants leaving a single (clown?) car, followed by a very dumb fight scene.

Jesus finds out that the reason that vampires can travel freely in the sunlight is that a mad scientist has been grafting the skin of the dead lesbians they've been kidnapping unto them, thereby protecting them from the deadly rays of the sun. For any vampires reading this, there's a thought, eh? Although maybe steer clear of the hate crimes.

However, Jesus on his own is no match for the entire vampire population and he gets completely trounced, at which point the movie treats us to a wonderful little take on the parable of the good Samaritan:

That's right, first a bishop walks past Jesus without helping him, then a cop (ACAB) and finally he gets help from a transvestite (according to the credits), who nurses him back to health. Support your trans communities as they would support you. <3

And that is generally the message of the movie. I don't want to spoil anything else. The movie is very worth watching, it's genuinely funny while also being very supportive of queer people. It's currently less than €3 on German Amazon, so go grab yourself a copy and experience this wonderful low-budget masterpiece for yourself.

I'll just leave you with this:

Unlike the US, Denmark has a fairly small film industry, which mostly produces cinema aimed at a local Danish market. There's not a whole lot of Danish horror or sci-fi movies, and the ones that get made tend to be godawful, with very few exceptions. For some reason I am not entirely aware of, I have decided to collect all of these Danish genre movies, since that seemed to be an achievable goal. Hence my collection of almost all of the terrible Danish horror movies:

I'm going to slowly work my way through these and write about them. First up is one of the more interesting titles: Skyggen, or as it's known internationally: "Webmaster". The front cover compares it to Blade Runner, but it is in fact significantly closer to Johnny Mnemonic.

Our story starts by introducing us to a central character of "Technopolis residential zone 4", an autistic super hacker that goes by "J.B." - After being caught inside a system that he shouldn't have access to, he's been made into a White Hat InfoSec type working to make the internet more secure. Sorry, did I say internet? I of course meant Cyberworld. Oh, and InfoSec was also wrong, he's a "Webmaster". Cyberworld is mostly your typical William Gibson metaverse as seen through the VR glasses and voice control used to interact with the virtual world.

To be a bit more specific, your level of access is dependent on three things. First is the transfer speed of the cable you're connecting with. To be able to access all parts of the network you need to be connected through a Tera Bit Connection, which is only available to a select few important users in the residential zone. Secondly you must be a member of Usenet type groups, which are based in a hierarchy that decides what you can and cannot do.

Lastly your access is granted using an ID optical disc, which serves as your credentials showing you are who you say you are, and gives you access to your "Cyber Ego", i.e. your virtual avatar. For a super hacker in charge of digital security, a single factor login system seems incredibly ill-adviced... But I'm no expert on InfoSec, and don't know enough to dispute it.

J.B. has a semi-platonic relationship with a private investigator known as Miauw, who is seemingly one of the only reasons he ever leaves his room and Cyberworld to interact with meat space. His own time is spent on routines and playing with his rich fantasy universe in the form of Cyber Egos that he trains.

I honestly don't want to spoil the story. It's a neo-noir crime story with your usual femme fatales and a ticking clock, as well as a few twists and turns. The writing isn't great and the acting is generally pretty bad - but it's all so very charming.

Content warnings for the movie though. It features a kink nightclub, several sex scenes, people getting brutally murdered and hints of previous pedophilia, so I completely understand if that's not your thing.

On the other hand it features a wonderful drag character, some very 90s ideas of the future, a protagonist who surfs the internet in just his undies while hanging upside down and wearing cool VR shades and of course a nightclub full of bargain bin Cyberdog ravers.

I had a lot of fun with this one.

Konga is a 1961 British King Kong knock-off starring the gorilla suit of famous gorilla actor George Barrows, but not Barrows himself as they were too cheap to fly him to England to work, instead finding a no-name actor that just happened to fit inside of the suit instead.

I was recommended this movie for an ape-themed movie night, where we ended up watching three other great movies instead (well, two awful movies and Link), and had been told that this one came highly recommended by a regular at my local video store who was really into monkey flicks.

First a content warning though. The protagonist of this movie is a massive bastard, who over the course of the movie kills a cat (not shown on screen, but the corpse of a cat puppet is), grooms a student, attempts a sexual assault and is in general a bit of a racist misogynist scumbag. I will not be showing anything graphic related to that in this post though.

The movie starts out with what appears to be a plane crash, but which we must conclude is actually a flying car, on account of the size of the explosion and how cars are famously the single most explosive thing in all of cinema.

The sole survivor of the crash turns out to be Dr. Charles Decker, a botanist with a massive ego, who turns up one year later after surviving in the Ugandan jungle thanks to being found by a chimpanzee that guided him to a local tribe, where he stole the knowledge of their witch doctor. Ooops, did I say "stole"? I meant "discovered". With this newfound knowledge of some of the local fauna he returns to Essex to revolutionize Botany and possibly more nefarious things.

Charles Decker is played by Michael Gough whom most of you will recognize as Alfred from the Burton/Schumacher Batman movies. In Konga he gives it his all and just exudes massive ham energy in every scene he is in.

Charles builds a new garden in his greenhouse containing carnivorous plants containing some kind of human elements that he plans to use in his research into increasing growth in both plants and animals, creating an all new garden of genetically modified plants.

Charles is creating a serum made up of the human-compatible plant genetic material combined with some zombie-herbs that will make injected animals grow huge in size and become susceptible to his control through hypnosis, and he of course plans to test this out on... Konga, the baby chimpanzee that saved his life. God, what a piece of shit.

To test out if he can control Konga, Charles orders him to go murder the Dean of Essex College where he works, who had accused him of being a madman and to maybe take a break and get better, which is obviously indefensible. Charles? Mad? Off you go Konga!

The bobbies are completely stumped by this murder, and remain stumped even after Charles Decker throws a party and invites another scientist working in the same field who he realizes might be unto the same findings as himself and might even be able to publish first. Now, Charles is a reasonable scientist, easily able to put aside his emotions in the name of science.

So obviously he handles things remarkably well...

Luckily Charles is convinced that he has left absolutely no clues that he has been behind the murders of these two people that he met up with within a few hours of their violent deaths...

Anyways, Charles has a thing for one of his students, and the entire class can tell, especially the student's boyfriend, who confronts him and tells him to keep it at a student-teacher relationship and nothing more.

Again the bobbies are completely clueless, and Charles decides that the best way to avoid raising suspicion is to invite the dead boy's girlfriend over for dinner, and to offer a shoulder to cry on, which is totally normal guys.

Now, Charles has an accomplice, his housekeeper and assistant Margaret who has repeatedly made him aware that she is into him, and has managed to make him promise to marry her in order to keep quiet about all the murders. Margaret may be a victim of sunk cost fallacy and a terrible taste in men, but she is not dumb, and she immediately realizes that Charles is making eyes at his student, and always intended to have her replaced.

Meanwhile Charles is busy explaining to the student how there is an evolutionary link between vegetables and animal life; that the key to all life lies in the cell, and that he has trained cells to perform miracles of biological engineering in cytoplasm, which when injected into the circulatory system has human properties that will speed up cell division by stimulating the centrosomes causing sudden massive growth. This seems wrong, but I don't know enough about biology to dispute it.

Margaret decides to try and re-hypnotise Konga to obey her, and also to give him a massive injection of the remaining serum. This mostly backfires on everyone involved.

Konga decides to go for a walk and to bring his good friend Charles, who like Margaret mysteriously seems to turn into a puppet sometimes.

And finally we get a climatic end at the closest thing London had to a skyscraper in 1960.

All in all I found this to be a quite fun watch if you can look past the fact that Konga is barely in the movie at all, and can only be called a dai kaiju in the lest ten minutes or so - and that the central protagonist is just such a massive creep throughout the entire movie. Yikes.

I just finished watching Wes Craven's Swamp Thing from 1982. Important to note is that this movie predates Alan Moore's run of the comics, so it is based exclusively on the earlier, slightly goofier stories. Swamp Thing is almost exactly divided into two halves, both which are enjoyable in wildly different ways. The first half has a lot of beautiful swamp shots, and focuses on establishing characters and stakes. We follow newly arrived Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) at a research station in the middle of a swamp, which we are told is filled with gators and other dangers. Multiple people have either gone missing or are deserting the place, which seems to be performing some secret government-funded scientific experiments. We also get a very fun scene of a group of camouflaged mercenaries ambushing someone in the swamp. One of the mercenaries turns out to be carrying around a venomous snake in his pants, and as he pulls it said trouser snake he wields it like a weapon, making it bite and kill the ambushed man.

The jokes write themselves. We eventually learn that the research is being done by Alec Holland, a character that I would swear was inspired by Jeff Goldblum's sexy Seth Brundle scientist man, if this movie hadn't been released four years earlier than The Fly. As it stands, Alec really wants us to know how sexy the swamp is, setting up for his eventual transportation into a sexy plant man shortly after.

You see, Alec is researching ways to make the plants of the far future of 2004 be resilient enough to grow in hitherto uncultivated climates, which he plans to achieve by injecting an animal nucleus into vegetable cells, thereby imbuing them with the fighting spirit of animals somehow. This feels wrong, but I am not well-versed enough in biology to dispute it.

Either way, Alec briefly turns into Herbert West: Plant Re-Animator after his glow-in-the-dark solution turns out to be a success, once again in a nod to a movie that would only come out three years later, somehow.

At this point characters and stakes have been establishes, so the mercenaries storm the research station, killing everyone but Cable, and dousing Alec with his solution while also setting him on fair, and demonstrating how badly equipped the lab is, without any kind of safety lab shower.

It is at this point that the movie drastically shifts tone, as it turns out that the main antagonist is modelled after the cartoonishly villanous Lex Luther of the Superman movies, and suddenly the movie becomes all about the mysterious Swamp Thing (who could it be??) fist-fighting the military while the self-declared super genius villain attempts to get his hands on the MacGuffin to grant him immortality.

Meanwhile the movie also starts getting things ready for the inevitable supernatural romance subplot as we and Cable learn that the Swamp Thing has a heart of gold beneath its rubbery exterior.

It gets really dumb as the fairly goofy looking Swamp Thing rubber costume gets much too much screen-time for this to still be a horror movie, and a few other silly costumes get added to the mix.

Definitely give this one a watch if you get the chance.