‘Swamp Thing’ on USA Cable: Ooze and Ahs

How awful can television get? And how distinctive? Well. . . .

He looks like he was used to drag the muddy bottom of a bayou. Either that or something your dog or cat threw up on the rug. He’s a watery, spongy, mossy mess of stringy vegetation, matted fungus and green ooze. Yet beneath this icky exterior, thumps a heart of gold.

There are many reasons to watch cable television. “Swamp Thing”--prime-time’s slime with a social conscience--doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Not on the surface. Not unless your taste runs to TV that is so very, very bad, beyond even camp, that it’s good. If not good, that is, at least a real hoot and more fun to watch than a show with loftier goals that go unmet.

A rich tradition of nonsense--which began with the Swamp Thing character of D. C. Comics, followed by the theatrical movies “Swamp Thing” and “The Return of Swamp Thing”--is being extended to TV at 10 p.m. Fridays on the USA Network. Tune in and you’ll see a comically vile-looking creature with the soul of a poet oppose the forces of darkness.

“The swamp is my world,” Swamp Thing says each week. “It is why I am. It is what I am.”

Important work. But is being Swamp Thing a full-time job? You wonder what he does in his spare time. Go to movies? Read? Kick back and regenerate?

The series hardly represents the first time a theatrical movie has been transferred to TV. But Hawkeye Pierce . . . Swamp Thing isn’t.

The leafy lug is actually Dr. Alec Holland, a brilliant, sensitive, handsome scientist who was transformed by a chemical accident into a walking wetland, destined to live indefinitely in the mushy, densely thicketed marshes of Louisiana, surfacing on cue only to thwart mad scientist Anton Arcane.

In the two movies, this entailed rescuing Adrienne Barbeau and Heather Locklear, respectfully, from Arcane’s clutches. Released in 1982, the original “Swamp Thing” movie incredibly plays this burlesque fantasy straight. After Swamp Thing has dispatched the evil Arcane (Louis Jourdan), the movie exits on a romantic crest with Swamp Thing sadly trudging off into the swampset after promising the smitten Barbeau: “I’ll always be with you.”

Although hardly big or memorable, “Swamp Thing” is “Dances With Wolves” compared to 1989’s “The Return of Swamp Thing.” But at least the latter immediately flashes a sense of humor by having ST rescue someone from an even more ridiculous swamp monster that has an elephant’s trunk for a nose. Arcane (Jourdan again) is naturally up to no good, this time conducting gene-splicing experiments that produce such exotic mutants as a man/cockroach.

If nothing else, “The Return of Swamp Thing” delivers one of the campiest lines in B-movie history. After eyeing the vines and goop hanging from him, Locklear says to Swamp Thing matter-of-factly: “You’re a plant, aren’t you?”

Obviously energized by the prospect of having sex with a plant, Locklear ultimately gets it on with Swamp Thing in the slippery muck. The movie ends with them contemplating a long-term relationship there.

Throughout the two movies and TV series, the man inside the hilarious Swamp Thing costume has been Dick Durock. In the movie sequel, however, Swamp Thing improved his elocution if not his looks, and changed his offense, throwing a devastating left uppercut and mean right cross instead of merely crushing heads with his hand or throwing people at trees.

In the TV series, which began airing in 1990, Swamp Thing does a lot of raging but is much slower to resort to violence. Moreover, Mark Lindsay Chapman’s Arcane is younger and hipper than the organ-playing Arcane of the movies, who lived in an antebellum mansion amid armed guards and love slaves.

“Is there a Mrs. Swamp Thing?” Locklear earnestly asks in “The Return of Swamp Thing.” As we learn in the series, there was but she was murdered by Arcane, who keeps the body of his own dead wife in a cylinder of cryonic acid, awaiting the moment when he can return her to life. Is this a blast or what?

Although he still looks strictly low-budget, TV’s latest Swamp Thing has been given a less tacky set and new supporting characters, none of whom was a factor in last Friday’s half hour, which launched a new batch of “Swamp Thing” episodes. They are scheduled to tackle such heavy issues as environmental destruction, drug abuse, teen suicide, dysfunctional families, teen runaways and the occult.

Apparently, the latter was meant to be seriously addressed on last week’s muddle of a show, in which the now gentler Swamp Thing came to the aid of his nemesis Arcane, who had been demonized by Tanda the voodoo priestess. The episode featured the inevitable big voodoo production number, plus a scene truly for the ages, with Swamp Thing performing an exorcism on the writhing, frothing Arcane. Later, Swamp Thing rejected a voodoo priest’s offer to turn him back into a human, saying he’d rather remain a God-created plant than a voodoo-created human. Talk about your high horses.

Get a life, Swamp Thing.

Not the kind of mad scientist who appreciates a favor, meanwhile, Arcane tonight plots the death of Swamp Thing, only to be foiled by a young woman who turns out to be the spirit of Mrs. Swamp Thing. Get out those hankies and wipe away the tears.

Of laughter.