Have you heard the song that a few old folks have hummed from time to time (through their missing teeth)? You know the ones who lived on the outskirts of Wayside Town. Well, they say a lot of things from time to time, including that the willow and the wisp live in a swamp where people die and drown, but somewhere near all of this, pontooning her luxurious blonde hair through the mucky waters, is a girl with skin like gold who goes by… well, Swamp Girl. No, she ain’t no cousin to no Swamp Thing (although she might give Adrienne Barbeau a run for her money) and she sure a whistling dixie ain’t no kin to that ‘Dueling Banjoes’ kiddo neither! If you look up the Okefenokee Swamp and see a beautifully innocent blonde-haired darling pushing her little rowboat with an oar (oar what?), don’t run your eyes too hard because it ain’t a mirage and it’s not an after effect from drinking too much whiskey moonshine. You are just witnessing the legend of Swamp Girl, the heroine of the 1971 hicksploitation Florida-shot filler-thriller that has just as much of an alligator bite in its exploitive-ness as it does a rousing theme song by country singer, and the star of the film, Ferlin Huskey (Hillbillies in a Haunted House)! If you’re made from saddle, sun, and smoke (how humans can be made from such materials is beyond me, much like the southern hillbilly charm most of the movies hold dear to) then you might have what it takes to make it to the end credits, but beware not only of her vicious bite, but she made a few friends with the gators, too!
Often focusing on the good ol’ boy charm of Kentucky fried southern culture, the ‘Hickspoitation’ craze covers several decades and ranges from filthy, boggy muck like Swamp Child to hilarious outings of drunken big-nose yokels like Snuffy Smith in Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, but nowhere did the genre hit as hard as a pig’s rear (some pun intended) as when the ragging rapid wilds of Deliverance hit the screens… a whopping year after Swamp Girl hoedowned at the local drive-ins! Even though films like Deliverance and White Lightning (both with an unshaven Burt Reynolds) left wakes in their paths to box office gold, filmmakers have been crawdaddying their way through the blackwaters of Hollyweird with southern charm (harm). It’s surprising how long it took to take off. Still, once audiences sunk their teeth into this southern hospitality, they were rearing to get and chomping at the bit to see every single murky gem they could stuff in their overalls! Not unfamiliar with low budget filmmaking, director Donald A. Davis got his cattail wet by appearing as an extra in the infamous Edward D. Wood, Jr. masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space (drinking a little moonshine as a local drunk) and went on to make (stupidly) low budget quagmire like Acapulco Uncensored, For Single Swingers Only, and the cheekily titled Her Odd Tastes before he went for more legitimate and respectable material like Gun Runner and The Golden Box (a movie about two blazing models who go under cover [in more ways than one] to find gold in them there hills). But with one of his final films as a director, Davis took a more general audience approach to this film, trying to release a movie that all could see, even though it still includes such taboo topics as teenage pregnancy, kidnapping, abortions, child trafficking, and biracial parenting, with a little rattlesnake death and hatchet wounds along the way! With all the crazy zaniness this little muck-rucker dredges from the swamps of poor taste, it is surprising how positive the message of family acceptance and open ideologies can rise to the surface from a movie made by people who usually ask for morass in the frame!
In the mysterious and dark swamp, where local men hunt and fish, there have been tales of a beautiful wild child who roams freely, even having local sheriffs (Huskey) write songs about their being and sign on the porch of dusk evening, looking over the swamp. Most tend to ignore it as some Grimm tale, until one of their hunting buddies is left for dead on the mangrove of Okefenokee Swamp, filled to the brim with snake poison (and a terrible 70s mustache). Those who saw know it was the Swamp Girl who did it, and the police motorboat their way through the swamps to find her. Although when they do, they promise to bring her to civilization. Upon this new development, she goes to speak with her ‘Pa’ who turns out to be an African American criminal who saved her from a swamp abortion doctor who sold orphaned children of teenage mothers who abandon their children raising her as his own, ‘Pa’ wants to protect her from the outside world she does not know anything about, including the criminal couple who kidnap the Swamp Girl to help them escape the law. Will the angel, such as Swamp Girl, help the devious thieves escape the swampland, or will they be too inundated with their own malaise to think they can harm a wetland woman who survives rattlesnake bites?
Airgating your way at a sluggish seventy-eight minutes, the title song by Huskey would be released on 45 single vinyl, but would never chart anywhere near his fifty-or-so country Billboard hits. You can find this film doggy paddling through the emergent plants in the hydric soil of Public Domain Hen, but do try to get a copy of the DVD release from Something Weird Video as a triple feature swimming alongside Swamp Country and the weirdly titled Swamp Virgin, referring to someone who has never been to marshlands before (everybody is scared their first time out). So, if you happen to be alligator hunting in the bayou, remember that if you see your eyes upon the legendary Swamp Girl, take a picture before she runs away because her heart says she was already in a smelly, wonky backwoods hick-up of drive-in swamp gas!
