Swamp Thing 3.9: Sensor and Sensibility

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So, let me see if I’ve got this straight.

There’s a guy named Ronnie, who’s one of the security agents guarding Alec Holland’s magical cabinet of wonders, out on the edge of a dismal, dreary swamp. Ronnie’s patrolling one day, when he comes across a large group of armed men, who are messing with one of the sensors. Ronnie thinks that nobody’s seen him yet, but then a big scary man named Ferret pops out of the bushes with a gun.

Ronnie tries to run, but he’s outflanked by other scary men emerging from behind basically every tree in the area. They manage to grab him, and then Ferret murders him with a pocket snake.

So I have a question: What is the sensor sensing?

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Swamp Thing 3.7: The Mysteries of Alessandro

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It’s your basic “boy-meets-girl, boy-becomes-cryptid” story, really. A woman walks into a laboratory, and the chemistry experiment begins.

As we’ve discussed, the three steps to getting the audience to like a character is to make a friend, make a joke and make something happen, and Dr. Alec Holland is about to do all three in record time. The appeal of Swamp Thing is half superhero-action and half romantic drama, so it’s only going to be effective if it can get us to believe in Cable and Alec as a couple, during the limited amount of time before he explodes.

So this meet-cute needs to be practically automatic, establishing that both parties are smart, funny and attractive, and getting them to challenge each other in sparky mini-clashes that are interesting to watch. The time-honored method is to get the characters to stick their hands in a murky water trough, looking for an imaginary animal.

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Swamp Thing 3.6: The Endless Anger of Harry Ritter

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“Where the hell’s my man?” Harry Ritter hollers. “I thought he was back!” He’s right over there.

That’s how we’re introduced to project field supervisor Harry Ritter, who’s coming in hot. I don’t know if you know what a project field supervisor does, but whatever it is, it’s terrifying.

“What’s going on here?” He’s still freaking out. “Get those crates into the church! You men in the boat, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Get that damn thing outta sight! Lamebrains!” I thought this project was supposed to be hush-hush.

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Swamp Thing 3.5: Premium Cable

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As Alice Cable’s snub-nosed motorboat glides through the swamp towards her next assignment, two nearby water birds squeal and take flight, giving her a mild startle.

“Weird, isn’t it?” says her colleague. “Local fishermen say this place is haunted.” By birds?

Handing her new hostile work environment a desultory glower, Cable misquotes a movie. “I don’t know where we are, Toto,” she mutters, “but it sure isn’t Kansas.”

Her colleague leans forward. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, and bats at a passing gnat. And that, strangely enough, is another step in Alice Cable’s full-on charm offensive, which takes up the first twelve minutes of the movie.

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Swamp Thing 3.4: Love and Death

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So the first thing that Swamp Thing wants you to know about swamps is that swamps are terrible.

Coptering into the movie on a super shitty afternoon, which communicates to me that they could only afford to rent the helicopter for one day and couldn’t wait for the rain to stop, here comes Ms. Adrienne Barbeau, all dressed up in a suit and a disdainful expression.

She’s flying in from Washington as part of a government operation that’s so secret, they won’t even tell the audience which branch they work for. There’s a scientist around here somewhere, under all the cloud cover, who insists on doing top-secret voodoo science in a rusty old whack shack out on the far edge of the forbidden zone, surrounded by two feet of water as far as the eye can see, and a lot of drippy, decaying junk that apparently we’re supposed to think of as “the environment” these days.

As far as I can tell, the scientist is supposed to stay locked up in the house all the time and recombine DNA or whatever; the one time we see him go outside for a minute, he gets screamed at for breaking protocol. So why does he need to have his lab in the middle of the least convenient location in the continental US? People say that remote work is the new normal but look what happens.

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Swamp Thing 3.3: It Wasn’t Wes’ Fault

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“So what were your feelings about the film, once it was finished?” the friendly voice on the DVD asks director Wes Craven. “Did you have any, you know… expectations?”

“No,” Wes sighs. “And, you know, I didn’t work for two years after that. I felt like I’d had my chance and kind of blown it, and would probably never work again.”

Now, this is my third time approaching a movie like this, and what I’ve learned so far is that the DVD commentary helps me to define what the genre of this story is going to be. When I was talking about the making of Superman and Superman II, the story was a true crime podcast. For Swamp Thing, it’s a comedy of errors.

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Swamp Thing 3.2: Dark Genesis

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It wasn’t supposed to be Swamp Thing, of course; Swamp Thing isn’t a “supposed to be” type character.

After Superman was a huge hit, the next superhero character to line up for a feature film was supposed to be Batman. The character had been around for almost as long as Superman, and was easily the second most popular DC character. It was Superman and Batman headlining World’s Finest Comics, and the Super Friends cartoon, plus there was that TV show that everybody liked.

Everyone in the world knew that if DC was going to make any more superhero movies, then the next character in line was Batman — except, of course, for every movie executive at every studio in Hollywood.

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Swamp Thing 3.1: The Birth of Modern Comics, But Not Yet

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We’re not in the North Pole, anymore. The scene has shifted from Superman’s pristine frozen hideaway in the Arctic, as we travel all the way south to the humid marshlands of Louisiana. The noonday sun hangs heavy in the cypress trees, and the air is alive with the susurration of insects, birds and reptilian mire dwellers going about their business, the sounds and smells of an endless tangled web of life, death and decay.

Slowly, from where you least expect it, a muck-encrusted mockery of a movie rises from the blog, a misshapen and misunderstood monstrosity that can only be called… Swamp Thing!

It is an ugly creature, unsteady and unkempt, but when you look into its eyes, you see the spark of intelligence and ambition buried within. It is strange, and it is alive, and it is the most important superhero movie ever made.

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Superman II 2.55: One Hundred and Eight Million Dollars

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Okay, we’ve spent eleven weeks talking about this double-headed hydra of a sequel, and here’s the bottom line:

On its first weekend in June 1981, Superman II earned the highest opening-weekend box office in history: $14 million, which was twice the opening gross for the first movie. It actually knocked Raiders of the Lost Ark out of the #1 spot, which had launched just a week before with a relatively small opening haul of $8 million.

This state of affairs didn’t last, of course. Superman II held on to the #1 spot for three weeks, but then Raiders came back even stronger, taking #1 back and holding onto it for nine more weeks. Raiders continued to perform well all the way through March 1982, ultimately earning $212 million. The Katharine Hepburn/Henry Fonda family drama On Golden Pond came in second for the year with $119 million, and Superman II came in third, with $108 million.

Superman II‘s take was a bit below the first movie, which made $134 million in 1978/79, but it performed very well. The comparable films in its weight class didn’t do nearly as well (besides Raiders, obviously): the year’s James Bond installment For Your Eyes Only made $55 million, Greek myth fantasy adventure Clash of the Titans got $41 million, and the pulp fiction inspired Tarzan the Ape Man earned $36 million.

But as successful as the Superman movies were, they were always overshadowed by the breakout hits that were even bigger: Jaws, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Return of the Jedi. The Superman movies could have been the iconic blockbusters of the late 70s/early 80s, if only George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had never been born.

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