Thirsty Dead / Swamp of the Ravens (Something Weird)

Customer Reviews:

Vampirism And A Chicken Coop Inferno!.......2007-05-20

Sometimes bigger is not better. This DVD is bloated at almost four hours of running time, but the best part of the set by far is the half hour episode of "13 Demon Street" featuring Lon Chaney and Swedish subtitles! The short is campy yet absorbing; hokey but compelling: I loved it. Save it until last, though, as you will definitely need a reward for the punishment that the two features dish out.

"The Thirsty Dead" is an extremely boring Filipino voodoo cult film, that mostly features annoying women walking around in the woods and riding around in canoes. I cannot stress enough how aggressively boring this movie is. Four kidnapped women are tormented in various drawn out ways over the course of the film; one of the women is picked to be the new queen by an ancient head-in-a-cube because she looks like a portrait in a prophecy. The crux of the plot revolves around our heroine, Laura, and Baru, a love-starved manservant in a flowing blue smock (think Greg Brady in a leisure suit, and you'll be close enough) who try to escape the general bloodthirstiness. Also featured is a blue haired creature with scaly claws, and perhaps the worst time lapse photography ever presented to a commercial audience. This movie was nearly unbearable, but the DVD was far from over.

"The Swamp of the Ravens" is a Spanish language film made in 1974 in Ecuador. There is a reason that Ecuadorian cinema never took off, and this is it. This is a relatively straightforward "crazy scientist messing around with corpses" film. Dr. Frosta has many socially unacceptable theories that require the death of many victims to study; he needs them in the first eight minutes after they die. The film starts with a profile of his relationship with a mystery woman, who is the ex-girlfriend of a nightclub singer who has absolutely no gift for either rhyme or meter. The singer and the girl are dealt with by Frosta in about the way you might expect after the creepiest breakup ever. Do not miss the spoken lyric dance number and the raven poetry ("Take your beak from my heart...") Shakespeare it is most decidedly not.

Frosta has a lab in a chicken coop by a swamp with lots of gross things in jars. I should mention that the film uses autopsy footage in some scenes, so forewarned is forearmed. Frosta disposes of his victims in a swamp which reaches critical mass about halfway through the film when the victims heads start poking up through the surface. Oddly, this is not noticed or acted on in any discernable way. A sheriff with a way with words ("The city's like a big anthill!") is hot on Frosta's trail, leading to the climactic chicken coop inferno that should end the movie but doesn't. Instead the film is ended in a totally contrived and immensely annoying way while calliope music plays in the background. This film is less boring than "The Thirsty Dead," but I actually liked it less.

There are several trailers for other Something Weird DVD's many of them setting new records for low quality. There is also a gallery of comic book covers accompanied by music from The Dead Elvi, and of course the "13 Demon Street" episode, which is a huge treat after the relentless badness of the two features. I would give the two movies one half star each, and two for the "13 Demon Street" episode, making this one of the less compelling Something Weird packages available.

The Something Weird collection is an oasis in a vast desert.......2004-10-04

The Thirsty Dead

There's this tribe of ancient zombies who live in the jungles of Bangkok, or Beijing, or the Philippines, or some other such Asian province, and in order to survive and stay young they must drink the blood of beautiful young women. So, they send out their young Asian goons to go to the strip joints, and the red lamp houses to kidnap bodacious young babes and carry them back to their camp in the jungle. After one excursion they inadvertently capture a young woman who strongly resembles some goddess that they once worshiped. Apparently there was some ancient prophecy that stated she was going to return to them, so they begin treating her like a queen. The fun has only begun... NOT!

I didn't even bother to watch this film when my DVD came in the mail, because I had already seen it. I ordered this for the other movie. I rented this movie about two years ago, and the print was so old and dilapidated that it wouldn't even play on my VCR until I used the head cleaner about a dozen times to clean off the dust that was left by the tape. By the time the film was over I ended up wishing I hadn't even bothered. This film is dullsville. I rented it hoping to see a really cool zombie flick, featuring beautiful young maidens being knocked out, and carried off into mysterious dark caves. What I got instead was a low-budget mess that just reminded me of a really bad episode of Star Trek. That was the last time I trusted a movie box that had no pictures on the back.

Swamp of The Ravens

Dr. Frosta is a biochemist. He is conducting research on animals based on a theory that certain parts of the brain continue to live eight minutes after clinical brain death. Hence, with the right drug injections, the dead can be brought back. He puts forth his theory to the medical council, and requests permission to conduct further experiments on cadavers, but of course they refuse (...). Of course that doesn't stop the good Dr. He decides to ignore the council and find his own test subjects. He preys on the homeless, winos, the handicapped, even his ex-girlfriend (I'll go into more juicy detail about that later).

Needless to say, most of his experiments are failures, and his rejected test subjects get dumped into the raven-surrounded swamp outside of his home. Hence the title of the film. But a filthy swamp can only hold so many corpses, and it eventually starts to reject them, as the heads of many of the Doctor's victims begin floating up to the surface and bobbing on top of the water like apples.

Pretty good movie overall. The Pink Floyd/Moody Blues/Jimmy Hendrix style soundtrack is totally awesome and compliments the dark mood of the film rather nicely. The heads floating on the water imagery is excellent. It got me cracking-up with laughter, as a matter of fact. Maybe that's the wrong reaction, but I don't care. I still liked it. My favorite part, though, was when the Dr. kidnapped and murdered his ex-girlfriend and turned her into one of his test-subjects. Just before he conducts his final experiment on her, he decides to get one last handful of hanky panky. So, he climbs on top of her corpse and begins screwing her, and kissing her cold dead lips. Ah, yummy. That was worth the price of admission, right there.

I would have given this DVD 5 stars if not for the first film. The Thirsty Dead just wasn't very good. I think Swamp Of The Ravens would have done just fine as a stand alone film on this DVD, but of course that would break "Something Weird Video's" tradition of sticking several films on a single disc. I guess it's a good policy to have. It offers great bargains on many obscure horror films that you might not otherwise be able to find anywhere else. I still think this DVD was worth it, though, and I'll definitely be checking out the other inhabitants of the "Something Weird" catalog very soon.

WARNING! MISLEADING REVIEWS & SNIPPETS!!.......2004-09-26

I'm here to help, as a fellow zombie movie fan. 'Swamp of the Ravens' IS NOT A ZOMBIE MOVIE!! Beware of the misleading description & reviews! I don't know who's watching what, but there are no undead in this film. It's a rather stupid, boring, nonsensical movie, like most Euro Horror offerings. The storyline is akin to 'Re-Animator', but with most of the storyline missing. Our Dr. Frosta is apparently run out of dodge by his medical board, yet somehow still retains his job while conducting secret experiments at his villa near a swamp. What the experiments are we never really know, but there is mention of an 8-minute time period after brain death where something is supposedly going on. Anyway, the Doc dumps his failed test subjects into the swamp behind his shack, and that's about it. They aren't zombies, they aren't undead, and they certainly don't rise from the grave to seek revenge on Dr. Frosta. They just kinda bob up and down in the water, that's about it. It isn't very creepy imagery at all, it just looks like actors standing in water up to their necks. One victim was a leper, so the face looks pretty rough, but the rest look like mannequins.

A very stupid movie that ruins a good horror concept. It would've been great if Dr. Frosta's failed experiments rose out of the swamp and stalked him through his villa, but why do that when you can make a completely incoherent mess of a film that makes no sense whatsoever? I'd much rather see a bad lounge singer (is that an oxymoron?) croon about his robot lady than watch waterlogged zombies rip a guy's heart out. That's what you get with 'Swamp of the Ravens'. How some films get published is beyond me.

An UNDEAD DOUBLE FEATURE From "Something Weird".......2004-05-10

This installment in the "Something Weird" DVD collection has GREAT sleazy & scary movies titled,The Thirsty Dead and The Swamp Of The Ravens.

In Thirsty Dead, kidnapped women of Manilla (this is a Philipino-horror film) are held under the cult-like spell of a 500 year old disembodied head in a box & a high preistess/dragon-lady! The members of the cult can live forever by drinking dining on human blood. Stated simply in the film - "They need a special liquid to stay young. It's red & thick & WARM!!!" Another strange little sicky from Something Weird!

The Swamp Of The Ravens deals with an experimental doctor-Dr. Frosta and his "human mistakes". He dumps these mistakes into a swamp and now the dead become "undead" to find the good doctor and exact their revenge on him! Actual autopsy footage & necrophilia are touched upon in this undead cheesefest of GORE!

Some of the best things about the whole "Something Weird" DVDs are the extras like: movie shorts, TV spots,Shockorama horror trailers for lots of their weird movies, galleries of exploitation art and even Horrorama RADIO SPOT ADS!

These DVD's are fun and interesting if you are into this kind of genre...

fantastic trash!.......2003-11-10

I liked both these movies. They were very, very low budget films. Thirsty Dead is a bit tame, but still bizarre and fun. Swamp of the Ravens has eerie zombies and actual autopsy footage. There is an episode of some horror show with Lon Chaney, and a bunch of (i can't believe anyone would make movies like these) trailers. A super cool easter egg too.

DVD:

DVD

DVD