Swamp Devil (2008)
7/10
Above-Average Sci-Fi Channel Creature Feature
24 November 2015
Arriving in a small town, a woman attempting to help clear her father's name who's accused of murder finds the real culprit is a lot more monstrous than she figured and tries to stop it's revenge-fueled rampage.

This was an overall decent creature feature. One of its better features here is the rather fine action scenes here which are quite enjoyable for how frequent they appear in this as the rapid pace becomes very important to these scenes. The opening attack in the forest is highly enjoyable, as the foot chase through the area provides some nice action before the creature emerges for a fine shock kill and eventual discovery, the shots of the posse stalking after the creature in the woods, a series of early attacks with the different parts of the creature come into play with all the vines and tree roots attacking cars and pulling victims along to their deaths in quite graphic fashion all come off rather nicely as these set-up the longer, more involved scenes rather well. The woodland encounter that shows off the creatures' true identity is a big reason for that as it's a truly enjoyable a scene with the triple stand-off, the transformation sequence is stellar as it leads into the frantic firefight and tense stalking of the creature around the forest which is quite fun and a later attack on their cabin features tons of action with the vines crashing through the dilapidated house and chasing them through the house with a flurry of gunshots before leading them away for another great encounter through the woods makes for a great highlight. The finale is another good one, presented as a high- speed chase to put the rather unique weakness into effect for a lengthy action scene as it tries it's tactics to stop them which is quite fun, and all of these action scenes are what move the film along. Given the unique design for the creature as it's a walking tree with plenty of roots and branches sticking out all over so it literally looks like a walking tree and the pretty graphics kills from the high body-count, these are what hold off the few flaws here. The film's biggest factor here is the main plot-point of getting the girl to come out, which makes no sense. There's little reason to believe that having her come out because her father is charged with murdering a local as that doesn't seem all that likely to occur in real-life. That this also leads to plenty of time driving around the town meeting up with the locals who are none too interesting spilling further information about the back- story, or she's interacting at the cabin doing even more investigations which aren't all that enjoyable or make the story any clearer. The last flaw here is the ever-present and continually below-average CGI for the creature. It never looks good, rarely interacts normally within the scene and looks really stilted and quite fake. However, this is to be expected and isn't as big a deal as is normal. These here are what hold this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.
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