Hey, it’s beach party time! Okay, so I strayed a bit off the beaten path. We’ve got more of an everglades party goin’ on here. It’s surprisingly hard to party in the everglades, what with the snakes, and the alligators, and the sharks, and the tigers, and the shape-shifting undead shaman who keeps interrupting the canoodling. Oh yeah, I said canoodling. I’m going to be saying canoodling a lot in the next thousand words or so. Just thought I’d give you a heads up.
So our intrepid Explorer Dan (a distant cousin to Cliff Hanger of Between the Lions fame, little joke for you parents out there) is poking around in a dingy tomb (read, cave made of muslin strung over some card tables from the director’s mom’s attic, and dressed with a few bags of that obnoxious pulled-cotton spider web crap everyone buys at Halloween and spends the next six months picking out of their food and raking out of their carpet). The inhabitant of said dingy tomb is none too pleased with the intrusion, and kills Explorer Dan, after which he helpfully thumbs through a scroll containing the movie’s credits.
Apparently the death wasn’t in the papers, because the very next day, Sam “Dr.” Gunter and his loyal pack mule (read, Mexican boy) Billy beach their boat near the tomb. Billy refuses to go any further into the swamp, having been handed down from his father legends of an evil witch doctor who cursed the area. After a great deal of terribly exciting footage of Sam “Dr.” Gunter wandering around in the swamp and setting up camp, the poor fool finds a stone marking the tomb of Tartu, the witch doctor who put a curse on the swamp. Next thing you know, Sam has a size- and species-shifting snake (maybe an anaconda, maybe a boa, who knows, thanks to the magic of stock footage and not having a budget to hire a real snake!) hanging around his neck. Although they couldn’t hire a live snake, the crew seems to have found a dead one, as Sam wrestles mightily with a real snake that is very obviously slithered off this mortal coil (PUN!).
Back in civilization, Billy warns Dr. Ed Tison, his wife Julie, and four of his students (lookin’ in my magic mirror, I see Cindy, I see Johnny, I see Tommy, I see Joann! DUN DUHDUHDUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUN DUH DUH DUH DUH! Dig that sweet soundtrack reference), not to follow Gunter into the swamp. Years ago he and his father guided two duck hunters into the area and they were eaten by a tiger. Not thinking this is strange at all, Ed shrugs off the warning and away we go!
After setting up camp and passing off Johnny hearing drums and chanting as heatstroke and the ‘shrooms kicking in, the kids set about canoodling while Ed and Julie talk shop. They’ve found the stone that got Gunter eaten by a dead snake, and Ed is suddenly worried that Billy wasn’t such a crazy Mexican after all.
That wacky Tartu being the ancient undead shaman version of the old guy with a shotgun full of rock salt yelling, “Goldurn smoochers on my property!”, no sooner than you can say “canoodle” Tommy and Joann, having gone for a quick between-canoodle (is that getting annoying yet?) swim, are attacked by a shark and torn limb from limb.
Ed and the others, having decided that Tartu is indeed real and a threat, send track star Johnny to run 25 miles through the everglades (because alligator-infested swamps are much the same as an asphalt track behind the schoolhouse) for help while they…uh…sit there and wait to be eaten by a dead snake, I guess. Johnny, massive load that he is, gets bitten to death by a water moccasin about ten minutes into his journey, leaving Ed, Julie, and Cindy to fend for themselves.
After deciphering from the stone that Tartu can only be silenced by nature (but having absolutely no clue what that means), the crew set off to the tomb itself to see the witch doctor (ooh ee, ooh ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang!). The door (which, for being a massive boulder, sounds suspiciously like a hollow-core interior house door when rapped upon, fo shizzle) slams shut, trapping Cindy on the outside. The tomb itself reverberates with the sound of hefty, three-beer (what up, Chad!) belches. Ed blasts the boulder out of the way with the powder from a couple of bullets (good job, Richard Dean Notgonnahappen), only he is too late. Cindy has been chomped to death by an alligator! Oh, no! So it’s back to the tomb, where Tartu finally rises to battle Ed and Julie…and gets swallowed up by quicksand. Poor Tartu, he just wanted to be left alone to a canoodle-free eternal sleep. Stupid archaeology students.
Well, as much drag-ass padding as there is in this movie (note to filmmakers, do not pad your 60-minute film out to 84 minutes with an extra 24 minutes of people wandering around in a swamp – see Octaman for further illustration on how not to make an exciting film), it’s surprisingly entertaining. The acting is slightly above par for a z-grade 1960’s horror flick, and there’s a bit of lame comic relief right before Tommy and Joann get eaten by a shark that I thought was pretty damn funny. Of course, I have what is possibly the most crippled and tasteless sense of humor this side of Jimbo’s Bad Pun Emporium, so that doesn’t mean much. It’s like asking Fistula if a Friday the 13th movie is good. Of course it fucking isn’t, but he loves ‘em anyway.
In fact, I would say that this movie is actually more entertaining (at least on a watch-it-by-yourself basis) than its more infamous and considerably goofier double-feature discmate, Sting of Death (which I didn’t review for this roundtable for the simple reason that I just watched it recently and couldn’t stomach hearing that damn Neil Sedaka song again this soon).
The Moral of the Story: Under no circumstances should you canoodle on the tomb of an undead shaman who has promised to return from the grave as a wild creature to destroy all those who canoodle on his tomb.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
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