Review of Swamp of the Lost Souls

1957's "The Swamp of the Lost Monsters" (El Pantano de las Animas or Swamp of Lost Souls) was a hybrid horror-Western like the previous year's "The Beast of Hollow Mountain," only its small scale plotline echoed the Poverty Row brand of 1930s Hollywood, lacking only the cowboy hero bursting into song. Here we have Gaston Santos, first introduced at the 15 minute mark atop his Lusitanian steed Rayo de Plata (translated as Silver Ray), hired to investigate the disappearance of a corpse, supposedly done by denizens of a 'haunted swamp,' which turns out to be an insurance scam spearheaded by the deceased himself to fool his blind widow, now disguised as a cheap knockoff of the 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' to ward off prying eyes. Literally saddled with a comic sidekick (Pedro de Aguillon), the pair work as a Latino equivalent of Roy Rogers and Smiley Burnette, with very little action, a ton of slow paced dialogue, and a sorry excuse for a monster that might compare favorably to Universal's "Curucu, Beast of the Amazon." This poor facsimile of the Gill Man can't frighten anyone but the comic relief, the titular swamp merely an ordinary shallow river, hardly giving this cumbersome creature any room to perform underwater despite a knife fight with Gaston, who calmly denies seeing anything down below afterwards! For a minor change of pace, the young heroine comes off weak compared to her plucky elders, using a multitude of vases to keep their captors on ice, Gaston's horse leading the final charge toward a broadly comic encounter where all the villains are easily rounded up in a strategically placed hayloft one by one (each and every gunshot missing by a mile), the monster finally unveiled as the least likely culprit. Gaston and Pedro would be teamed again the following year in "The Living Coffin," while Santos alone would assume a stoic role in the superior "Black Pit of Dr. M."