Director Larry Buchanan’s Curse of the Swamp Creature is a worthy companion to the parade of “swamp-stomping mad scientist trying to shake off meddlesome interloper” films which populate one of horror’s tiniest genres. It’s not hard to make waves in such a small pond, and Curse of the Swamp Creature certainly doesn’t disappoint devoted horror fans, many of whom follow Larry Buchanan as a kind of successor to Schlock horror’s undisputed Grand Champion, Ed Wood.

The Curse of the Swamp Creature is that he lives at all. In the murkiest reaches of Louisiana’s bayou a reclusive scientist experiments with the genetic map and creates a sort of man-phibian out of one of his apprentices. Meanwhile a cadre of well-meaning interlopers and less-well-meaning con-artists threatens the Doctor’s harmonious freak-making activities and themselves become fodder for future human-animal hybrids. If they don’t stop him, no one will be safe from “The Curse of the Swamp Creature.”

All of the elements of good “bad” cinema are here in spades. Dopey acting, campy dialog, silly monsters, and interior sets that look like someone’s Grandma’s house got invaded over the weekend and turned into an evil laboratory brimming with everything one would need to do radical genetic engineering. Well, maybe not everything. But he does have an aquarium and some test tubes.