★★★
“Marsh ado about nothing.”
One of the earliest films directed by Roger Corman, it’d be a major stretch to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I found it entertaining. It definitely has better female characters than most movies of the mid-fifties. Four women break out of jail and head into the swamps, in search of stolen diamonds which were previously hidden in the Louisiana swamps. Except, one of them is an undercover police officer, Lee Hampton (Mathews), who had been inserted into prison to join the gang and lead the escape, in the hope of recovering the loot. After the car breaks down, they hijack a boat owned by an oil prospector, Bob, and his girlfriend, taking them hostage as they head deeper into the bayou.
Things unfold more or less as you’d expect, though not exactly how Lee would have planned. There’s dissension in the ranks, fighting between the women for the attentions of Bob, encounters with native wildlife, and copious amounts of stock footage. The last is both of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and expensive elements like helicopters, helping pad the running-time, though it still comes in on the underside of seventy minutes. By all accounts, there was hardly a corner which Corman left uncut, such as the women doing their own stunts. Mike Connors, who played Bob, said, “The girls in that picture had it much worse than I did… They had to trudge through the mud, the swamps, pulling this rowboat, and I was sitting in the rowboat high and dry.”
Characterization beyond Lee is largely limited to the colour of the women’s hair – blonde, brunette, or redhead – though Josie (Marie Windsor, the star of Outlaw Women) is effective as the de facto leader of the group. It is nice there’s no attempt made to give them boyfriends or husbands. They make their own decisions, and follow through with them, entirely on their own terms. This brand of mid-fifties feminism results in more than one instance of them rolling around in the swamp, cat-fighting each other. Somehow, their hair, clothes and make-up miraculously seem to escape any kind of damage in these brawls, and return to pristine condition for the next scene.
On the way to the finale, Vera (Garland) tries to sneak off with both the jewels and Bob, paying the price for her treachery. The authorities manage to lose track of the group, and Josie grows increasingly suspicious of Lee’s resistance to violence. The leader eventually orders Lee to kill Bob; the shots fired in the ensuing fracas are enough, conveniently, to attract the search party, while Vera and Lee battle through the forest and – inevitably, into the water. It’s all entirely ridiculous, and the scope for parody makes it easy to understand why it was MST3K‘d. Yet even at this early stage, Corman clearly understood that the worst crime a B-movie can commit it is to be boring. For all its flaws, Swamp Women is never that.
Dir: Roger Corman
Star: Carole Mathews, Marie Windsor, Beverly Garland, Jill Jarmyn


I am, probably, biased here. Scottish action heroines are pretty rare, to the point I am hard pushed to think of a single one I’ve covered previously, in the twenty years I’ve been running this domain. [I just made myself feel
That peace is shattered when someone is washed up on the Western Isles island of Dachaigh where 20-year-old Melcorka lives with her mother. It turns out the Norse are invading, and the king must be notified of the threat. Melcorka and the rest of her clan head towards the capital, only to arrive too late: the army of Alba (as Scotland was then called) has been routed and the nobles scattered. However, Melcorka has a destiny to fulfill… And also inherits a large sword, Defender, with a history dating back centuries, whose powers transform her into the titular character. It’s up to her to rally forces, including the ferocious Picts from the North, to take on the invaders, and send them back across the North Sea to Scandinavia.
Daphne Wool (Varela) has finally had enough of her abusive husband, so has killed him, chopping up the corpse and keeping it in a storage locker. Which actually is a good thing, because it turns out he was wanted by the Mob, and there was a price on his head. For their “help” in carrying out the hit, Daphne and pal Tony Steele (Cappello) are rewarded, but things go further. Daphne becomes a full-time assassin for the gangsters, learning to kill with everything from a paper-clip up, while Tony acts as her facilitator. However, they quickly become a liability to the organization, and are given a “poison pill” contract, being sent to kill weapons inventor Vincent McCabe.
I think it’s safe to say you’ll probably be able to decide within a few minutes, whether or not this is your cup of tea. The opening scene is set in a strip-club where the next act on the main stage is dressed as a nun. After a couple of minutes, she pulls out an unfeasibly large weapon from under her clerical garb, and guns down the mobsters present, in gory fashion. Thereafter, you can expect more of the same, along with extremely savage jabs at organized religion. Catholicism is the main target, but Judaism and Hinduism get their share of jabs: for example, Gandhi is a martial arts teacher. Or there’s a Yiddish hitman, Viper Goldstein (Lavallee), who practices the art of “Jew Jitsu”. If you just roll your eyes at that, this is likely not for you. However, if you roll your eyes and also laugh, then you, like me, may be the intended target audience.
The main theme of this book appears to be, “How far will a mother go, to protect her daughter?” Based on what we read here, the answer to that question appears to be, “Very, very far.” The heroine is Sherica Daniels, who initially appears to have somewhat lucked out and escaped a nasty and abusive relationship. Her husband, drug addict Roy, has just died following a pair of botched armed robberies. That should leave her and teenage daughter Ashlynn to get on with their lives. Not so fast. For it’s only a short while before Roy’s drug dealer, Tokie, shows up. He’s demanding Sherica pays her husband’s debt – and more, because he believes she knows where the unrecovered loot from Roy’s robberies was hidden. When she fails to convince Tokie otherwise, he abducts Ashlynn.
A woman wakes up in a bedroom, with no knowledge of where she is, how she got there, or even who she is. Gradually, she (and the reader) find out the answers to at least some of those questions. Her name is Diya, and the bedroom is on Luna, which has now been settled and colonised by humanity. That’s the simple part. The rest? It’s complex. But is summary, she is a cyborg, created as part of a black budget research project by the NeuroDyne Corporation (Earth’s biggest employer – they basically own Iceland). An employee who had moral qualms about the scheme, smuggled Diya off-planet, stashing her with his blind sister Terry and a robot caregiver. But NeuroDyne aren’t letting their investment just walk away.
Yeah, as the above might suggest, this owes a rather large debt to
Lou Farnt (Brayben) is stuck in her life, with a dead-end job, no apparent friends to speak of, and still living with her domineering mother (Ball). She seeks escape from one self-help guru after another, spending her money on their books, DVDs and audio-tapes, though with little or no apparent positive results. Then, she meets the unconventional Val Stone (Roe), who lives in a seaside caravan and promises to change Lou’s life forever. After some qualms, she agrees to depart with Lou, who does indeed deliver on her promise. For, as the title suggests, Val is a psychotic if smart killer, who is specifically targetting those same gurus. Either she regards them as a curse on humanity with their vapid schemes, or she simply wants to dispose of the competition.
I’ve previously talked about – OK, “ranted” may not be inappropriate – the perils of message movies. But I did wonder whether it was the specific content to which I objected. Would I dislike a film so much, if I was on board with its strident message? On the evidence here, I can confidently state: hell, yes. For this is painfully earnest and hard to watch, much though I agree with the environmental topic, that humanity’s use of plastics are threatening the oceans. An alternative needs to be found. By which I mean, I strongly suggest you find an alternative to watching this movie. The poster has clearly strayed in from a far more entertaining offering, and bears little resemblance to what this provides.