Don Fabio has died, but when his son Javier wants to take a last look
at him before he's buried, his body is gone. Javier wants to get his
friend Gastón (Gastón Santos), a prominent investigator, to look into
the case, but he is ambushed and murdered trying to get to Gastón, but
lives just long enough to give him the basic details. Gastón soon
arrives at Don Fabio's home, where he receives assistance from Don Fabio's
niece and his own childhood sweetheart Julieta (Manola Saavedra) and Don
Fabio's wife María (Sara Cabrera), who's secretly blind, but his
investigations are seriously blocked by Don Fabio's brother Don Nacho
(Manuel Dondé) and the family doctor Morales (Salvador Godínez) ... oh,
and then there's this monster, some kind of fishman, living in the nearby
swamps and scaring the living shit out of everybody. Eventually, Gastón
finds out about Don Fabio's life insurance in his brother's name, and
figures Don Fabio must have faked his own death in order for him and his
brother to split the money - and the doctor fits into this story quite
nicely, naturally. Once Don Nacho and the doctor feel their plot's
uncovered, they take Julieta and Dona María hostage, but to no avail,
Gastón gets them in the end. But where on earth is Don Fabio? Before
Gastón even has time to investigate this part of the plto, he is attacked
by the monster, but wrestles it down, tears off its mask - and reveals the
monster was actually Don Fabio in a monstersuit equipped with diving gear. An
at the first glance weird blend of Western-, murder mystery- and monster
movie-elements, that upon closer inspection shows remarkable parallels to
US-American B-Westerns from the 1930's, before genre boundaries had grown
disappointingly rigid. But Swamp of Lost Souls also resembles these
films in style: Its direction is at best functional, the story, despite
all of the genre-blending, is very straight-forward and simplistic, the
cast is hardly above mediocre, and it's incredibly easy to seperate the
good guys from the bad boys. All of this is not to say Swamp of Lost
Souls is a bad movie, it's actually pretty watchable for what it is, a
low budget Western with a monster tagged on, it's just nothing special,
either ...
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