The Swamp of the Ravens, Is Everyone in Ecuador Weird?

Today we take a look at the greatest film ever to come out of Ecuador.  Ecuador?  Yep, just think Bolivia without the glitz.  It was not until 1974's "The Swamp of the Ravens" that the story of this country's love affair with mad scientists could be told.  Sure, Uruguay and Paraguay had Nazi mad scientists, but who knew Ecuador had their own?  Directed by Manuel Cano, this film chronicles a mad scientist's quest to bring the dead back to life.

Travesty!  We see this happen a lot. A brilliant scientist is denied human test subjects and recently deceased corpses' by a prudish medical board at an esteemed medical college. Never fear, Dr. Frosta (Ramiro Oliveros) is not a quitter...neither was Dr. Frankenstein.  He has a serum almost (okay, maybe not almost) perfected in which if given eight minutes after death, the deceased come back...kind of.  He sneaks aboard ambulances to try this out and it works...sort of.  It needs refinement...as if Fauci's vaccine doesn't.  Yep...you guessed it...he gets his own recently dead corpses.  So they aren't quite dead when he abducts them...in the interest of science I think we can forgive him.

His laboratory is in a swamp and he throws his failed tests in it.  They'll re-emerge, you'll see. Uh oh...his girlfriend Simone (Marcelle Bichette) has dumped him for a nasally lounge singer, Richard (Marcos Molina)  You know Richard...he sings 'Robot Woman.'  You'll hear him perform...bring earplugs.  Simone is quite the dish.  Both Richard and Dr. Frosta woo a mannequin of Simone when she is with the other one.  They do that in Ecuador.  Unfortunately for Simone, Frosta has always told her if he can't have her alive, he'll have her dead.  Now he abducts Simone, not her mannequin and brings her to his swamp laboratory.  As the failed experiments come back to the surface, Simone may be in for quite the horrific fate.

If Frosta can bring the dead back to life, will the Bolivians be able to bring the mannequin to life?  Is a future with Richard the nasally lounge singer a worse fate than being resurrected from the dead to serve an ambitious mad scientist?  Has Ecuador been going down hill ever since they scrapped making serums to bring the dead back in favor of coffee bean crops?  This is a wild but creepy film and yes there are ravens (buzzards, actually) in it.  For an education about a certain South American country, see  "The Swamp of the Ravens."