Tuesday, February 9, 2021

'The Swamp of the Ravens' (1974) - Manuel Caño.

 

This truly exemplary vomit of unbound Euro-horror weirdness is messily projected in lurid colour by fiendishly tasteless director Manuel Cano whose gruesome knack for greasy, nut-ball bonkers visuals is given ample room to groove in his grimy opus, 'The Swamp of The Ravens' (1974). While there are many grimily veiled references to Edgar Allan Poe, the film owes a huge diabolical debt to H.P Lovecraft's immortal short story 'Re-Animator'. There are also a few sinister similarities to Stuart Gordon's landmark film; especially in the eerie manner the foully 're-brained' corpses awaken in such a grammatically impaired, full-voiced fashion! Much like maestro Lovecraft's classic eldritch tale, the disgraced medic continues his doomily debased experiments with circumventing the grim finality of brain death, and perfecting his titanically troublesome elixir in a suitably Gothic locale; a mouldering, cadaver-infested swamp seemingly overrun with these truly gross-looking Raven / vulture hybrids constantly shrieking as if at the brink of some terrible agonizing death themselves! The majestically morbid and suitably weird psychedelic pan-pipe soundtrack by Joaquin Torres doing much to increase the already monumental levels of brain-tweaking oddness to vertiginous levels of delirium! (There is this one wildly incongruous montage featuring a series of especially malefic-looking stillborn babies in jaundiced pickle jars which is in delightfully bad taste!) 'The Swamp of The Ravens' is diabolically delirious, psychotronic midnight movie madness that should greatly appease the gibbering necrophiliac that lurks deep inside all of our murky synaptic folds!








 



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