Swamp Women [PG]

A cache of famous diamonds has been hidden away whilst the girls in the gang who stole them hole up in jail for three years. In a final attempt to recover the diamonds, a policewoman named Lee agrees to go undercover in the women’s prison and infiltrate the gang of girls who know where the diamonds are hidden. With her assistance, they break out of jail and head for a large bayou to recover the diamonds, but Lee’s task becomes trickier when they have to steal a couple’s boat and take them hostage. Lee soon finds herself torn between her duties to remain undercover and recover the stolen diamonds and her duty to protect the hostages, especially as she starts to develop feelings for the man. 

Another quirky ‘classic’ from writer/director Roger Corman, Swamp Women definitely has ‘cult’ potential. Whilst it doesn’t have the strangeness of story like Little Shop of Horrors or the weird special effects of The Terror, this movie works as Corman’s action thriller that’s a bit Down By Law meets Thelma & Louise (though obviously nowhere near as good as either of those films). 

The story is simple and solid enough: undercover cop infiltrates gang and unforeseen obstacles make her task of recovering stolen diamonds somewhat difficult. A nice level of drama is injected through Lee’s inner conflict between duty and emotions, not just towards the male hostage, but towards all the girls in the gang too. Then we’ve got the thrill of the travel movie, because essentially everything happens whilst travelling through a Louisiana bayou making it a road movie with alligators. 

Conflicting personalities, girls butting heads and indeed engaging in a number of fistfights and punch-ups in incredibly short shorts (sometimes in mud) bring further excitement and entertainment to the film. Indeed that would totally be what makes this movie a ‘cult’ movie: one can image Russ Meyer maybe taking a stab at this. We’ve got two blondes, a brunette, and a redhead making up the central core of our cast and their characters are pretty much as clichéd as one could expect. We’ve got the blonde leader with straight hair and a fringe, Lee is the brunette and as such she is overly rational, there’s another little blonde who’s promiscuous and a bit of a ditz, and then the redhead is fiery tempered and ready to punch anyone’s lights out. At the end of the day, they may be clichés but they work for the movie. 

It would have been better if the performances were a little more developed and separate from one another. Each of the girls seems to be more or less playing the same role and as such, it’s hard to like or hate any of them really. Even our undercover heroine adopts the cynical, hardboiled female inmate character and it gets a bit dry. 

Starring Marie Windsor, Carole Mathews, Bevery Garland, Mike Connors, Susan Cummings, Lou Place, Jonathan Haze, Ed Nelson, and Jil Jarmyn, Swamp Women is another relatively bad Corman movie that works to make itself good by its quirkiness and ‘cult’ tropes. Filled with action, drama, tension, and romance it’s not a whole lot but it works for what it is.