Terror in the Swamp / Nutriaman / Nutria Man: Terror in the Swamp / Nutriaman: The Copasaw Creature (1984) -***

     I probably ought to start by explaining what a nutria even is, since they’re not exactly a critter that people talk about every day. Although the word means “otter” in Spanish, the nutrias we’re concerned with have nothing in common with those, apart from being furry, semi-aquatic mammals. Whereas otters are mustelids— carnivores distantly related to cats and hyenas— nutrias are very large rodents native to South America. Residents of el Norte might plausibly mistake one for either a runty beaver or an overgrown muskrat. And like beavers, nutrias had the decidedly mixed fortune to evolve exactly the sort of fur that you’d covet if you lost yours back on the African veldt a couple million years ago. Entrepreneurs on the Gulf Coast started importing them to the United States in the 1930’s to stock fur farms, with the inevitable result that you can now find feral populations of nutrias all over the swampier parts of the Southeast. I even saw a nutria here in Maryland once, although that was very unusual. Fundamentally tropical animals, nutrias don’t like the icy winters of the temperate zones. Anyway, one thing that nutrias definitely aren’t is an obvious candidate for monsterization, except perhaps from the point of view of a frog or a freshwater fish. And yet here Terror in the Swamp is, asking us to accept a nutria being mutated into a sort of junior sasquatch by nefarious genetic meddling at the behest of an international fur-farming cartel. More incredible still, Terror in the Swamp’s producer/lead writer/co-director, Martin Folse, seems to want us to take this majestic lunacy seriously!

     Freelance fur trapper Dennis Cuvien (Terror in the Swamp doesn’t credit its cast by character name, and I’ve had a hard time pinning down who plays whom) is plying his trade in Louisiana’s Copasaw bayou. Alas for him, though, he isn’t the only predator prowling the swamp this morning. Also out on the Copasaw is something large, hairy, and manlike, with huge, rending talons, and it seems to take a curious protective interest in the local nutria population. The creature waylays Cuvien, and leaves him in a state that Frank the game warden (I’m reasonably confident that this is Billy Holliday, who is also credited with concocting the movie’s basic plot) has never seen in all his years of intermediating between wild animals and the drunken yahoos who want to kill them.

     Nor is the dead man the only swamp-dweller to encounter the monster that day. It also throws a scare into a couple of fellows whom I came to think of as the Hogshit Brothers, who were similarly out checking their strangely empty nutria traps. Quite a pair, these two. Older brother Jesse (probably Chuck Bush) is almost as dumb as he is mean, while younger brother T-Bob (definitely Michael Tedesco) is almost as mean as he is dumb. Either one of them would say if you asked them that the only thing they’re afraid of is their even nastier father, Papa Joe (not a clue), but both brothers’ blood turns to piss at the sound of the creature’s growling call— and the pretzel that it makes out of T-Bob’s discarded rifle suggests that they’re much better off for only having heard it.

     Meanwhile, a pair of scientists in the employ of a fur-farming consortium based somewhere in Latin America are having a meeting with their increasingly impatient boss. (Don’t ask me who plays any of these folks, either.) In theory, the whitecoats’ work was supposed to boost the companies’ profit margins by multiplying product output; simply put, the idea was to create giant nutrias through a combination of hormone treatments and genetic manipulation. In practice, however, the project has been nothing but a money pit. Worse yet, the scientists can’t even discuss the closest thing to success that they’ve achieved so far, because it’s also their most embarrassing fuckup. Spencer, the younger of the pair, unwittingly injected one experimental nutria with human growth hormone, and although that animal did indeed get big, it also mutated into a vicious and preternaturally clever bigfoot-looking thing— and as if that weren’t bad enough, it escaped from the lab a little while ago! All Roberts, the senior scientist, can offer the furriers is more assurances that they’re getting close, which is exactly what they’d already said several months and several million dollars ago.

     I’m sure the parish medical examiner (another major figure whom I’m unable to identify) would be very interested to overhear Roberts and Spencer’s conversations both before and after the meeting, because however incredible it might sound, his autopsy on Dennis Cuvien indicates beyond any question that the man was killed by a freakishly gigantic nutria. The creature even left the tip of one of its claws embedded in Cuvien’s breastbone! A young deputy by the name of Bruce (Chuck Long) laughs when he hears that, but the sheriff and Captain Arnold, Frank’s direct superior (no idea about those two), have both seen too much weird shit in their time on the bayou to share his derisive mirth. If the coroner says they’ve got a giant, killer nutria on their hands, then they’re going to proceed on that assumption. Maybe a bit of that attitude would have saved Papa Joe Hogshit, who gets himself killed about then hunting what he assumes to be poachers, despite being told by Crazy Sally the swamp hag (Claudia Wood) that her cabin was attacked the night before by a giant nutria.

     The upshot of all this is that the Copasaw creature has quite a few enemies going into the final act. The Proper Authorities, recognizing when they’re outmatched, borrow some soldiers from the National Guard to even the odds. The Hogshit Brothers recruit a couple of their swamp rat buddies to help avenge their fallen dad. Roberts and Spencer set out for the bayou, too, only they can’t seem to decide which is the higher priority— covering up their misdeeds by destroying the monster, or getting the hell out of Dodge before anybody else figures out that they’re responsible for the whole mess. And in by far the most credible thing to happen in Terror in the Swamp, reports of a monster in the Copasaw draw out every trigger-happy imbecile in the parish. With that many armed and dangerous factions running loose in the swamp without an ounce of trigger discipline, I wouldn’t rule out a Creature from the Haunted Sea ending that leaves the monster the last one standing at the closing credits.

     I cannot fucking believe that somebody got it into their heads to do Humanoids from the Deep with a nutria. What’s even more incredible, however, is that after arriving at such a totally daft idea, Martin Folse and his collaborators gave it their best good-faith effort. This is no Sharknado or Zombeavers we’re dealing with here. Folse rounded up the best wannabe actors he could find, secured funding for a whole array of surprisingly big action set-pieces, and even commissioned a monster suit that would stand a fair amount of scrutiny (even if there’s very little about this generically furry monster-man that suggests a humanoid nutria specifically). The film moves at a decent pace despite a certain repetitiveness, belying Folse’s inexperience as a director, and you certainly can’t accuse him of shying away from the hassles inherent in shooting on the bayou. The cinematography by Wade Hanks is always sharp, thoughtful, and mood-appropriate— and a few shots here and there are downright stunning in how they capture the natural beauty of the wetlands. Terror in the Swamp also exemplifies a unique strength of the regional cinema scenes that started cropping up across America in the 1960’s, and proliferated throughout the 70’s. Just as the works of Larry Buchanan, John Russo, and Bill Rebane invariably feel like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin respectively, even when they’re no damn good (which is most of the time), Terror in the Swamp feels like rural Louisiana in ways that a Hollywood picture shot on location around Houma simply wouldn’t. None of that should be taken to imply that this movie isn’t cheap schlock, you understand. Indeed, I’m a bit surprised that an outfit as reputable as New World Pictures acquired it, even for their then-new home video label. But Terror in the Swamp is cheap schlock that somebody cared about. If the pride in workmanship that it exudes outstrips the actual ability that went into creating it, that’s part of what makes it so endearing.

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