Riding the tail winds of the Spider Man & X Men movie successes, Marvel Comics figured what the hell, why not some cheapy-ass embarrassingly bad stuff too. "Not good enough for theaters," it premiered on the sci-fi channel, & got all the non-attention it deserved.
It'S set in a backwater town of the Everglades (without resembling the Everglades) in that mystic part of Florida with no Cubans, no retirees, & only one oil rig secretly set up in the darkest part of the swamp where it is destroying the phony-looking environment.
For the developer to get rights to the swamplands only required the murder of one Indian, who has returned as Swamp Thing -- no, that's not it, this one is Man Thing, a big tentacled stump-monster that rams its roots down the throats of innocent & guilty alike, not that we get to see it actually do much, most of the deaths occurring before the New Sheriff arrives in town to piece it all together.
 In lieu of a climax, someone just blows up the oil rig, which makes the monster happy & it melts away. The sheriff & his girlfriend are the only characters left alive, but are they sad that so much life was lost? 'Course not! They are even happier than Man Thing & can kiss in the fauxest of faux happy endings ever concocted from warmed over cliches.
Nothing interesting ever happens. One waits & waits for a real peak at the monster & when we do finally see it full-camera stomping around in the mud, it's just transluscent CGI of the lowest calibre poorly integrated with human characters. Even so, its acting is better than the understandably unknown human players.
The original Man Thing (shown at right) looked like one of the Fantastic Furry Freak Brothers after a mudbath at Woodstock, crossed with Oscar the Grouch. His main power, other than being big & mindless, is to set people on fire by touching them. The fact that none of that applies to the movie sure isn't the reason the movie sucks so bad.
Anyone who actually liked the Man Thing comic book will be disappointed that the movie version is just a random swamp monster with none of the original Man Thing's specific traits. Then again, anyone dumb enough to like the original Man Thing would probably like piss dripping in his eyes, & this movie'll seem just dandy.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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